The Nym Mixnet Testnet Is Live: The Fight For Digital Privacy And Autonomy

What is at stake in the development of the Nym mixnet is not mere individual privacy, but our very autonomy. We will overview the rise of surveillance as a technique of control, the real limitations faced by network-level privacy tools like VPNs and Tor, and how they impact cryptocurrencies, and then we'll demonstrate how to integrate a new cryptocurrency wallet of your choice, like Monero, with the Nym mixnet.

Why are we building Nym? Every human evolves today in an intertwined physical and digital environment. If each individual is to keep their individuality and autonomy in their daily choices, it must be protected and given effective tools to defend its own autonomy. Yet digital-only accelerated with the advent of COVID where the digital world increasingly subsumes our physical reality. Nym is one tool that lets us defend our own and each other's autonomy.

While last year we described how Nym mixnet could prevent mass surveillance of network traffic, now we have built the first working version of the mixnet in Rust where mixnet node operators can be paid in Bitcoin for mixing user traffic and making it more private. The Nym mixnet currently has over 350 nodes spread throughout the world. With the addition of the SOCKS5 proxy in our latest version, we can now integrate Nym against wallets like Electrum and even Monero full nodes in order to provide the first glimpse of a digital world where mass surveillance is not only illegal but a technical impossibility using the power of cryptography.