Nym Technology, the blockchain-powered privacy startup Nym Technology raised $13M in a financing round. This puts Nym Technology’s valuation at around $270 Million.
The round was led by venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Crypto) with Grayscale’s parent company Digital Currency Group, Huobi Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, HashKey, Tayssir Capital, and over two dozen others participating in this round.
Nym aims to be the best fit for “bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions” and has plans to maybe even integrate its technology with protocols like Lightning Network, Nym CEO Harry Halpin said in an interview.
Nym plans to hire new employees and increase its 8-member staff to almost 4x. The company has already hired Chelsea Manning (ex-U.S. Army intelligence analyst, whistleblower), who leaked thousands classified documents via the privacy software Tor.
Amidst this, Nym’s co-founder George Danezis, also rejoined the project last month after briefly leaving the project to help design Facebook’s digital currency Libra (rebranded Diem). The social media giant also bought his other company Chainspace, which he founded.
Nym will also be offering grants to third-party independent developers starting next year.
Just four months back, Polychain Capital led a $6.5 million investment in Nym, and before that, in 2019, Binance’s VC arm had led a $2.5 million seed investment in the privacy startup.
“Encryption is becoming an incredibly important component of the internet today, and Nym provides privacy at the very bottom layer as a foundation for other private solutions to be built on top,”Ali Yahya is general partner of Andreessen Horowitz.
You can Make Privacy Real Online
Mixnet is a three-year old company based in Switzerland. Node operators receive tokens for mixing internet traffic. This makes it more difficult for adversaries to obtain information at the highest levels, such as nation-state-level mass surveillance, like NSA.
Nym offers privacy credentials services that allow users to limit access to their activities when necessary without disclosing their identities.
Nym is currently in testing mode and has approximately 5,000 nodes. Nym also boasts 30 validators. Plans are to make the network fully operational by year’s end.
Last week the team launched a desktop wallet that allowed node operators pledge their tokens for Nym membership. Based on the quality and quantity of their work mixing internet traffic, they will earn additional tokens in return. This ensures quality services and incentivizes miners to do great work.
These economic incentives, along with mixnet’s potential, according to Halpin, will help Nym “to make privacy real on the scale of the entire internet.”
Besides wallet, the Nym Network also released open-source code for the world’s first Mixnet Explorer, which it defines as an essential tool for decentralized quality control and security auditing.
Additionally, Nym’s tokenomics has been fully coded up and deployed to testnet Milhon, saidThe team at its weekly developer update.