Swiss privacy startup Nym Technologies has hit a key milestone on the road to the launch of its fully functional mainnet, generating the first block on its Cosmos blockchain as it begins onboarding institutional players as validators of its network.
Nym said one of its most notable new validators is the Swiss telecommunications giant Swisscom, with others including Dokia Capital, the a16z-backed Figment, Chorus One, Nodes.Guru. and Commodum, which volunteered as a validator for its 2021 testnet.
Nym is working to establish privacy as a default for online communications through the Nym Protocol and the mixnet it enables.
On traditional internet networks, traffic can be tracked easily. Even a privacy-focused browser such as Tor, which relays traffic through a series of servers to obscure a user’s location, is susceptible to metadata observation. It means that anyone with enough resources can see the timing of data packages sent across a network to understand what is going on, even if they can’t see the content of those packages.
On the other hand, Nym’s mixnet employs proxy servers to obscure the metadata left behind when information travels through a network. Data packets are “mixed” with one another and emitted in a random order compared to how they came in, making it impossible to track user activity through metadata. When data packets are mixed multiple times by each proxy server, it becomes impossible for anyone monitoring network traffic to see who is communicating with whom.
Nym has been working hard to enable a truly private internet, creating the mixnet token NYM, launching the Nym Desktop wallet and the open-source mixnet explorer, followed by the debut f its testnet in 2021. Onboarding validators is the next step on the road to getting Nym’s incentivized mixnet up and running. Validators fulfil a vital role, helping to maintain the mixnet by providing consensus for the network topology mix nodes at any given time. They also maintain a public history of all NYM token transactions and perform roles such as certificate creation, protection against double-spending and generating anonymous Coconut credentials needed to access the mixnet.
Landing Swisscom as a partner is a major coup for Nym, validating its efforts to build a decentralized and incentivized global privacy network.
“We are thrilled to partner with Nym and support the development of privacy-enhanced infrastructure and foster new data-ownership centered business models,” said Swisscom’s Fintech Innovation Manager Dominic Vincenz. “We are convinced that data privacy is one of the most important factors for decentralized open networks to succeed.”
In addition to onboarding its validators, Nym said it has enabled smart contract uploads to its Cosmos blockchain. The “Nyx” blockchain is designed to enable cost-effective smart contract execution at a lightning-fast rate of 10,000 transactions per second, Nym explained. Nym Chief Technology Officer Dave Hrycyszyn said Nyx is a big deal, and that it will work in tandem with Nym’s validators and CosmWasm, a Web Assembly-based smart contract environment on Cosmos, to integrate Coconut privacy features.
“In addition to our privacy mixnet we can now offer a powerful general purpose smart contract blockchain,” Hrycyszyn said. “This is a step in the direction to allow us to extend Coconut functionality, meaning application layer privacy, to an entire developer ecosystem.“
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2022-01-19 15:00:04
