The funding round was led by Polychain Capital, and included a host of European investors such as Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven11, Tioga, and 1kx. Will Wolf of Polychain Capital says “We’re incredibly excited to partner with the Nym team to further their mission of bringing robust, sustainable and permissionless privacy infrastructure to all internet users. We believe the Nym network will provide the strongest privacy guarantees with the highest quality of service of any mixnet and thus may become a very valuable piece of core internet infrastructure.”
A novel approach to anonymize traffic
While the General Data Protection Regulation relies on companies to be trusted with personal data on the threat of fines, Nym prevents companies from data harvesting in the first place by using cryptography and decentralization rather than consent pop-up boxes. Unlike traditional VPNs, Tor, or Apple’s new privacy relay network, Nym anonymizes the traffic sent to any app from unwanted third parties, making it impossible to tell when or even if a user is even accessing a particular app. Even with traditional encryption and VPNs, a powerful adversary can determine “who is talking to whom, where and when” by looking at patterns in internet traffic using AI.
Compared to competitors, Nym adds a number of key features that are aimed at preventing this kind of “traffic analysis.” This is done using a mixnet and via mixing internet packets individually, similar to shuffling packets like a deck of cards. If there are not enough packets in the network at a given time, the network then adds fake traffic.
Nym’s mixing of packets is done by currently over 9,000 distributed servers across the world, a network currently larger than even Tor in number of nodes. While VPNs and Apple force you to trust their corporate infrastructure and Tor relies on volunteers, Nym uses incentives inspired by Bitcoin to build a trustless network that aims to be an economically sustainable network.
Growing interest for an ambitious project
Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, remembers that “When our startup was first starting back in 2018, we had no interest from traditional venture capital firms, which honestly didn’t take privacy seriously at the time. Olaf Carlson-Wee, and myself met by chance at the Web 3.0 conference in Berlin at the end of 2018, and he told me his firm Polychain would support privacy technology – and now in 2021, we have more venture capital interest in Nym and privacy than we could fit into the Polychain-led round.”
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the original initiative for Nym came out of the European Commission PANORAMIX project in 2014 to build a European privacy network that could withstand even NSA mass surveillance. Now the European Commission has doubled down its bet on privacy via continuing to fund and mentor the work of Nym via POINTER and LEDGER grants.
As a former French government cryptographer with restricted ZRR clearance (zone à régime restrictif) and a former student of France’s leading philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler explains, Nym has deep roots in France. Co-founder Harry Halpin is part of the Founders Programme at Station F, the largest startup incubator in the world in Paris. Therefore, it's natural that Nym expands in Europe, using the new round to more than double its number of employees, including hiring cryptographers, developers, and marketing specialists in privacy.
Lior Messika of Eden Block, who participated in the pre-seed funding of Nym and the current round, states that “For the last three years, the Nym team have been silently building one of the most ambitious privacy projects in the world. Beyond the technology involved, the team's vision of an Open Internet enabled by privacy and data protection is too grand to disregard. The potential for Nym is to revolutionize the way our data is used and protected, with the help of a next generation of privacy infrastructure. This infrastructure will pave the way for a variety of different applications, and will form the decentralized privacy layer for Web 3.0”
Gathering momentum
Nym is today on the fast track. The Tech4Trust Season 2 Startup Acceleration Program Finalist has not yet launched officially its software which is currently tested across the world. “The company wants to serve a diversity of users, as you can only be anonymous in a crowd” explains the CEO. So it expects early adopters to be both cryptocurrency users and human rights activists, two groups that normally do not work together but are driven together by the need for privacy.
Despite not having paying clients yet, the privacy startup has already a partnership with Blockstream as part of the Liquid Federation, one of the largest Bitcoin companies globally that help maintain the core Bitcoin infrastructure. It also has a partnership with the Mask Network, a Chinese group that helps users send encrypted messages. Harry Halpin adds that its startup is raising interest from many companies, among which Brave browser. Furthermore, Ben Laurie from Google has joined our scientific advisory board.
(Press release - ES)
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