Nym, the next-generation privacy infrastructure, today announced the details of its “Finney” testnet, thus opening the network to anyone who wants to run a node. Nym’s Finney test network has grown to more than 3,500 hybrid nodes in two weeks, which is comparable to the growth rate of established networks such as Tor. Used by many Bitcoin projects. Unlike Tor and VPN, Nym Mix nodes merge data packets at various levels, thereby improving privacy against powerful opponents.

With the support of Binance Labs and Interchain Foundation, Nym launched its initial testnet in 2020. Anyone can join, and the Sybil attack expanded the network to more than 12,000 nodes (twice the amount of Tor) in one night in November 2020. The team transitioned to the new Finney testnet, which used the mortgage token HAL, used the Tendermint blockchain and a cutting-edge Rust-based Cosmos implementation to earn its initial reputation. This transition removed the Sybil node from the previous network, and now anyone who can declare a unique telegram name can start a Mix node.

Finney Mixnet and its HAL token are named after the famous cypherpunk Hal Finney, which received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Hal strongly supports increasing privacy and anonymity in the Bitcoin network.

Sam Hart Grant, manager of Interchain Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Cosmos, said: “Nym brings together the most advanced anonymous research and distributed system engineering to create technologies that empower civil society. The Interchain Foundation expects that many Cosmos projects will integrate Nym’s Network-level anonymity, but Nym is also a milestone in private peer-to-peer communication and an opportunity for hybrid networks to finally enter the mainstream.”

Nym is an open source, decentralized, permissionless and incentive system that provides full stack privacy, allows developers to build applications, and provides users with metadata monitoring for network traffic levels and authentication and authentication levels Strong guarantee. payment. Nym’s team is composed of leading research scientists and developers from world-class universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leuven University and University College London.

Nym’s CTO Dave Hrycyszyn added: “This is our largest release ever. Using a currency based on the Cosmos SDK will allow us to open the network, but make sure it is still able to withstand Sybil attacks. A few months ago, we suffered from it One of the tortures, although it’s nice to see that our architecture can still operate normally after expanding from 500 nodes to 12,000 nodes, we still need to keep abreast of things and maintain the quality of service to our users. Say it’s very high.”

The next step for Nym’s Finney testnet this month will be to implement reward sharing and hybrid proof algorithms in the white paper, which will cause the testnet to shrink to a smaller number of high-capacity nodes to ensure high-capacity nodes. service quality. However, all nodes will then be allowed to use delegated bets in order to vote on the best performing node.