Privacy Startup Nym Technologies Launches “Nym Sandbox” Testnet for Community Participation

Ahead of its highly anticipated mainnet release, Switzerland-based privacy startup launched the Nym Sandbox testnet to serve as the permanent testnet alongside the recently launched Nova testnet.

The Nym Sandbox is open to developers, node runners, and researchers who want to try out the Nym mixnet architecture before joining or deploying on the mainnet. The launch of the Sandbox testnet is a critical milestone in Nym’s development cycle of the three-step mainnet release.

As part of the Nym Sandbox launch, the Nym development team has also released a critical “CosmWasm 1.0” upgrade to enhance further the capabilities of its smart contract platform that powers the NYM tokenomics.

With each new release bringing the team closer to its mainnet launch, Nym CTO and Co-Founder Dave Hrycyszyn notes, “The permanent testnet is an important step in the development of the entire Nym architecture. It will contain most major components and smart contracts, but in a secure test environment for us to tweak any issues before we begin the launch.”

Unlike Nym’s previously launched testnets, the Nym Sandbox won’t be incentivized. Developers can use the Sandbox testnet to build and integrate wallets and other apps, send messages, process transactions, and run nodes and gateways. However, the testnet will include “test” tokens and reputation design that replicates the mainnet tokenomics such as reward sharing, active, standby, and inactive nodes, among others. In addition to this, the Nym development team will also move all of the nodes, delegations, and reputation scores from the current testnet, Milhon, to the Nym Sandbox testnet.

The Nym Sandbox release will also greatly benefit the research community. By employing the Sandbox testnet, researchers can run simulations on the privacy and security aspects of Nym’s Mixnet Explorer, wallets, blockchains, and dApps that are running on them.

According to Professor Ania Piotrowska, Nym Head of Research, “Early on we concluded that the benefits of our Nym Sandbox testnet Nym Sandbox environment would be a boon for research purposes. We believe it will be instrumental in helping familiarize both the crypto and non-crypto communities with our technologies, all while granting them the chance to engage with our novel privacy services in a riskless environment.”

Nym is a Swiss-based privacy software project that integrates several privacy technologies to build an infrastructure of cooperating networked nodes. It is one of the first privacy-focused projects that simultaneously provides integrated protection against metadata surveillance on both the network and transaction levels.

While most existing solutions can only cover one layer at a time, Nym ensures full-fledged end-to-end privacy for personal data. Founded in 2018, Nym serves as an open-source, decentralized, and incentivized system that consists of a decentralized mixnet explorer (a network of mix nodes) alongside an anonymous credential cryptosystem.

Protecting communications metadata and privately proving “right-to-use” services are two key aspects of Nym’s privacy-enhancing design. Operational costs are covered using NYM tokens, which are used to pay nodes contributing to the protocol. Nym is backed by some of the leading names from the industry, including Binance, Huobi Capital, Polychain Capital, European Commission, Fenbushi Capital, Digital Currency Group, and several others.