What Is Nym (NYM) - the Crypto Privacy Project?

Nym is the next generation of privacy, engineered by some of the world’s leading research scientists and developers at world-class universities. The system comprises a mixnet providing privacy at the network level, credentials providing privacy at the application level, and the NYM token to reward those who run the system, making it sustainable and scalable in the long run. In an era where digital privacy is more crucial than ever, Nym is proudly unveiling the NymVPN, a pioneering solution that sets a new standard for online privacy and security. Unlike traditional VPNs, NymVPN is built on the Nym network, an entirely decentralized infrastructure that eliminates any single point of failure or control. This ensures unmatched privacy protections, including completely private payments via zk-nym credentials, leveraging zero-knowledge technology to eliminate financial trails.

How does Nym provide privacy?
Nym is a “full-stack” privacy system, developers can hook their existing applications to the Nym platform to protect their users at the network level via Nym mixnet, and protect them at the application layer via Nym private credentials.  Together, these will have the capacity to add privacy to the broader blockchain industry: the Nym mixnet provides privacy at layer 0, which adds meta-data protections for other blockchain and cryptocurrency projects that are at layer 1 (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) and layer 2 (including most DeFi projects). 

What is Nym mixnet?
The Nym mixnet is a decentralised network of computers arranged in 3 layers. Your communication traffic is sent through it wrapped in multiple layers of encryption using SPHINX packet format which makes every piece of data passing through the mixnet look exactly the same. In each layer of the mixnet, your internet traffic is mixed with other people’s traffic, and the metadata that uniquely identifies your communications ie. your IP address, timing and destination is obfuscated. This means that your messages are “lost in the crowd” and not only the content but also the meta-data of your messages is protected and your communications are private. There is a saying amongst privacy crowds that says “Privacy loves company”, which is what a mixnet provides; the more data is mixed together the more private everyone’s data is. 

What is the NymVPN?
NymVPN emerges as the first of its kind, a truly private consumer product designed to safeguard your data and metadata from prying eyes. Unlike traditional VPNs, NymVPN is built on the Nym network, an entirely decentralized infrastructure that eliminates any single point of failure or control. This ensures unmatched privacy protections, including completely private payments via zk-nym credentials, leveraging zero-knowledge technology to eliminate financial trails.

NymVPN introduces two modes to cater to diverse privacy needs:
VPN Mode: A decentralized, secure 2-hop mode utilizing the WireGuard protocol, optimized for speed without compromising medium-level privacy.
Mixnet Mode: Offers comprehensive pattern protection security, preventing metadata analysis for those requiring high privacy with medium performance.


Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

Pepe

Uniswap

Lido Staked Matic

Apu Apustaja

Frontier

Phala Network

Gomining

StakeWise Staked ETH

Dent

Polygon Ecosystem Token

Synapse

Alephium

CAW(A Hunters Dream)

Phemex Token

Kendu Inu

Osaka Protocol

Destra Network

ChainGPT

Cipher

Dogelon Mars is a dog-themed meme coin on Ethereum and Polygon. It follows the example of other successful dog coins like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Floki Inu.

Dogelon Mars plays on several popular themes in the meme coin space. Its name is a mixture of Dogecoin and Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who is an outspoken supporter of Doge. It alludes to Mars, a spin on the famous moon meme, implying that Dogelon will experience a massive upward movement. Beyond its tongue-in-cheek name, Dogelon Mars has managed to build a significant community, with more than 300,000 Twitter followers and more than 84,000 followers on Telegram.

Dogelon Mars

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency originally described in a 2008 whitepaper by a person, or group of people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It was launched soon after, in January 2009.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer online currency, meaning that all transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants, without the need for any intermediary to permit or facilitate them. Bitcoin was created, according to Nakamoto’s own words, to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

Some concepts for a similar type of a decentralized electronic currency precede BTC, but Bitcoin holds the distinction of being the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into actual use.

Bitcoin

Launched in July 2017, Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange globally based on daily trading volume. Binance aims to bring cryptocurrency exchanges to the forefront of financial activity globally. The idea behind Binance’s name is to show this new paradigm in global finance — Binary Finance, or Binance.

Aside from being the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, Binance has launched a whole ecosystem of functionalities for its users. The Binance network includes the Binance Chain, Binance Smart Chain, Binance Academy, Trust Wallet and Research projects, which all employ the powers of blockchain technology to bring new-age finance to the world. BNB is an integral part of the successful functioning of many of the Binance sub-projects.

NEAR Protocol is a layer-one blockchain that was designed as a community-run cloud computing platform and that eliminates some of the limitations that have been bogging competing blockchains, such as low transaction speeds, low throughput and poor interoperability. This provides the ideal environment for DApps and creates a developer and user-friendly platform. For instance, NEAR uses human-readable account names, unlike the cryptographic wallet addresses common to Ethereum. NEAR also introduces unique solutions to scaling problems and has its own consensus mechanism called “Doomslug.”

NEAR Protocol is being built by the NEAR Collective, its community that is updating the initial code and releasing updates to the ecosystem. Its declared goal is to build a platform that is “secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people.”

Flux, a protocol that allows developers to create markets based on assets, commodities, real-world events, and Mintbase, an NFT minting platform are examples of projects being built on NEAR Protocol.

NEAR Protocol

Launched in 2011 by Pixowl, The Sandbox is a blockchain-based virtual world allowing users to create, build, buy and sell digital assets in the form of a game. By combining the powers of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the Sandbox creates a decentralized platform for a thriving gaming community.

According to the official whitepaper, the Sandbox platform’s main mission is to introduce blockchain technology in mainstream gaming successfully. The platform focuses on facilitating a creative “play-to-earn” model, which allows users to be both creators and gamers simultaneously. The Sandbox employs the powers of blockchain technology by introducing the SAND utility token, which facilitates transactions on the platform.

The Sandbox

RACA

Polygon (previously Matic Network) is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building multiple types of applications.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Polygon Matic.

Using Polygon, one can create optimistic rollup chains, ZK rollup chains, stand alone chains or any other kind of infra required by the developer.

Polygon effectively transforms Ethereum into a full-fledged multi-chain system (aka Internet of Blockchains). This multi-chain system is akin to other ones such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche etc. with the advantages of Ethereum’s security, vibrant ecosystem and openness.

The $MATIC token will continue to exist and will play an increasingly important role, securing the system and enabling governance.

Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a Layer 2 scaling solution backed by Binance and Coinbase. The project seeks to stimulate mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by resolving the problems of scalability on many blockchains.

Polygon combines the Plasma Framework and the proof-of-stake blockchain architecture. The Plasma framework used by Polygon as proposed by the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, allows for the easy execution of scalable and autonomous smart contracts.

Nothing will change for the existing ecosystem built on the Plasma-POS chain. With Polygon, new features are being built around the existing proven technology to expand the ability to cater to diverse needs from the developer ecosystem. Polygon will continue to develop the core technology so that it can scale to a larger ecosystem.

Polygon boasts of up to 65,000 transactions per second on a single side chain, along with a respectable block confirmation time of less than two seconds. The framework also allows for the creation of globally available decentralized financial applications on a single foundational blockchain.

The Plasma framework gives Polygon the potential of housing an unlimited number of decentralized applications on their infrastructure without experiencing the normal drawbacks common on proof-of-work blockchains. So far, Polygon has attracted more than 50 DApps to its PoS-secured Ethereum sidechain.

MATIC, the native tokens of Polygon, is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens are used for payment services on Polygon and as a settlement currency between users who operate within the Polygon ecosystem. The transaction fees on Polygon sidechains are also paid in MATIC tokens.

Polygon

SXP is the native utility token of the Solar blockchain. Users can stake it to secure the network and earn rewards, and pay transaction fees on the Solar blockchain. They can also help govern the Solar blockchain by proposing and voting on changes to the protocol, and earn rewards for providing liquidity. Additionally, Solar DApps use SXP as their primary currency.

Solar

Ethereum is a decentralized open-source blockchain system that features its own cryptocurrency, Ether. ETH works as a platform for numerous other cryptocurrencies, as well as for the execution of decentralized smart contracts.

Ethereum was first described in a 2013 whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin. Buterin, along with other co-founders, secured funding for the project in an online public crowd sale in the summer of 2014. The project team managed to raise $18.3 million in Bitcoin, and Ethereum’s price in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was $0.311, with over 60 million Ether sold. Taking Ethereum’s price now, this puts the return on investment (ROI) at an annualized rate of over 270%, essentially almost quadrupling your investment every year since the summer of 2014.

The Ethereum Foundation officially launched the blockchain on July 30, 2015, under the prototype codenamed “Frontier.” Since then, there has been several network updates — “Constantinople” on Feb. 28, 2019, “Istanbul” on Dec. 8, 2019, “Muir Glacier” on Jan. 2, 2020, “Berlin” on April 14, 2021, and most recently on Aug. 5, 2021, the “London” hard fork.

Ethereum’s own purported goal is to become a global platform for decentralized applications, allowing users from all over the world to write and run software that is resistant to censorship, downtime and fraud.

Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Solana.

The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.

Because of the innovative hybrid consensus model, Solana enjoys interest from small-time traders and institutional traders alike. A significant focus for the Solana Foundation is to make decentralized finance accessible on a larger scale.

Solana

Biswap (BSW) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for BEP-20 tokens on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Biswap promises the lowest transaction fees of any BSC exchange at 0.1% and vows to be committed to innovation in DeFi through its high-quality products and services. Its referral system allows users to invite others and receive referral fees from farms, launch pools, swaps, and a lottery.

Biswap’s core products include the standard DEX functions like an AMM, liquidity pools, yield farming, an NFT marketplace, and an IDO launchpad. In its roadmap, Biswap targets the following:

Listing on major crypto exchanges

Improvements of its NFT marketplace

Cross-chain support

Limit orders

Lending & Borrowing

A personal user dashboard

A swap referral program

Furthermore, Biswap announced a $10 million global incentive program to collaborate with other BSC projects. Partners can expect a 90% fee reimbursement, farming pairs with BSW, a launch pool, marketing promotion, and grants for security audits and project development.

Biswap

Aptos is a Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that employs a novel smart contract programming language called Move, a Rust-based programming language that was independently developed by Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Diem blockchain engineers.

Aptos’s vision is a blockchain that brings mainstream adoption to web3 and empowers an ecosystem of DApps to solve real-world user problems.

The PoS blockchain can achieve a theoretical transaction throughput of over 150,000 transactions per second (tps) through parallel execution.

In March 2022, Aptos raised $200 million in a seed round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other crypto heavyweights like Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital took part in the funding round. Fast forward to July, the startup raised another $200 million in a Series A round with participation from Dragonfly, Apollo Global, Franklin Templeton, Animoca, Jump Crypto and others.

Two months later, Binance Labs made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in Aptos.

On Oct. 18, 2022, Aptos announced the mainnet launch, while the Aptos genesis occurred on Oct. 12, 2022.

Aptos

Oasis is the pioneering layer 1 blockchain designed to enable scalability and confidential compute. Oasis is home to Sapphire, the first confidential EVM that empowers Web3 and Decentralized AI developers to build dApps with Smart Privacy natively on Oasis or other EVM-based chains.

ROSE is the native token of the Oasis Network used for gas fees, staking, delegation and governance. With a unique layered architecture, Oasis presents the optimal building and execution environment for DeFi, AI, GameFi, NFTs, the metaverse, data tokenization and DAO governance. Oasis also has native support for rollups at the consensus layer.

Oasis

Toncoin (TON) is the native cryptocurrency of the decentralized layer-1 blockchain, The Open Network (TON). The TON blockchain is open-sourced and supported by many network contributors, including the Switzerland-based non-profit organization, the TON Foundation.

Since 2017, the Telegram team had been developing the codebase for a blockchain network, then named Telegram Open Network (TON), with a native cryptocurrency named 'Gram.' In May 2020, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced the end of Telegram's involvement with the TON Blockchain following a court order by the SEC. The Gram token was never issued.

Since 2020, the technology has been developed by an independent community of developers and blockchain enthusiasts. The non-profit TON Foundation is the most prominent of these supporters. The blockchain was renamed from "Telegram Open Network" to "The Open Network," with Toncoin now the native cryptocurrency of the TON network.
The whitepaper contains part of the original codebase written by Dr. Nikolai Durov, co-founder of Telegram and brother of Pavel Durov. Toncoin utilizes the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model for network scalability and reliability.

TON Foundation's vision is to empower 500 million users to own their digital identity, data, and assets by 2028 by empowering developers to build a Web3 ecosystem in Telegram Messenger.

Toncoin

SHIB is a decentralized, community-led currency held by millions across the globe. Since its inception in late 2020, the Ethereum-based SHIB token has grown to become a worldwide phenomenon, and is now accepted as a form of payment at hundreds of locations, either directly or through third-party intermediaries.

Shiba Inu coin was created anonymously in August 2020 under the pseudonym "Ryoshi." Ryoshi says about himself that he is a nobody and not important and that the efforts to unmask his identity, even if successful, would be underwhelming.

This meme coin quickly gained speed and value as a community of investors was drawn in by the cute charm of the coin paired with headlines and tweets from personalities like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.

Since release SHIB now trades on the ecosystem's proprietary DEX, ShibaSwap.

Polkadot is an open-source sharded multichain protocol that connects and secures a network of specialized blockchains, facilitating cross-chain transfer of any data or asset types, not just tokens, thereby allowing blockchains to be interoperable with each other. Polkadot was designed to provide a foundation for a decentralized internet of blockchains, also known as Web3.

Polkadot is known as a layer-0 metaprotocol because it underlies and describes a format for a network of layer 1 blockchains known as parachains (parallel chains). As a metaprotocol, Polkadot is also capable of autonomously and forklessly updating its own codebase via on-chain governance according to the will of its token holder community.

Polkadot provides a foundation to support a decentralized web, controlled by its users, and to simplify the creation of new applications, institutions and services.

The Polkadot protocol can connect public and private chains, permissionless networks, oracles and future technologies, allowing these independent blockchains to trustlessly share information and transactions through the Polkadot Relay Chain (explained further down).

Polkadot’s native DOT token serves three clear purposes: staking for operations and security, facilitating network governance, and bonding tokens to  connect parachains .

Polkadot has four core components:

Relay Chain: Polkadot’s “heart,” helping to create consensus, interoperability and shared security across the network of different chains;

Parachains: independent chains that can have their own tokens and be optimized for specific use cases;

Parathreads: similar to parachains but with flexible connectivity based on an economical pay-as-you-go model;

Bridges: allow parachains and parathreads to connect and communicate with external blockchains like Ethereum.

Polkadot

APENFT

Hashflow is a DEX Aggregator that offers deep liquidity across the leading blockchains. Hashflow offers traders the best prices, access to $8B in liquidity, and the ability to trade every token both interchain and cross chain. Since launching in April 2021, Hashflow has facilitated over $18B in total trade volume.

Hashflow's team consists of top minds from both web2 and web3 including Airbnb, Amazon, Arbitrum, Citadel, Genesis Trading, and more. Backers include Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Trading, and Balaji Srinivasan.