Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Harry Halpin & Jaya Klara Brekke: Nym – The Next Generation of Global Privacy

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The current lack of privacy on the internet exposes billions of people to mass surveillance and data breaches, undermining trust in digital services and stifling innovation. Nym is a mixnet and develops the infrastructure to prevent this data leakage by protecting every packet’s metadata at the network and application layers.We were joined by Nym's CEO & Founder Harry Halpin, and CSO Jaya Klara Brekke, to chat about the threat mass surveillance has on society, what Nym sets out to do and take a deep dive into the architecture of the protocol.Topics covered in this episode:Harry and Jaya's backgrounds and how they got into cryptoHarry's personal experience with surveillanceMass surveillance on the internetThe rationale behind the cypherpunk manifesto “transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest of us”The 'general public's' attitude towards privacyThe Nym infrastructure, purpose and benefitsHow Nym works with other applicationsHow does incentivization workHarry's relationship with Julian AssangeEpisode links:“Privacy for end users, transparency for the infrastructure” blog postEp 339 - What Julian Assange Represents to the Crypto MovementNym websiteMain TelegramNode Setup Help ChatGitHubDocumentationYouTubeHarry on TwitterJaya on TwitterNym on TwitterSponsors:Tally: Tally is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashCowSwap: CowSwap is a Meta-Dex Aggregator built by Gnosis. It taps into all on-chain liquidity - including other dex aggregators such as Paraswap, 1inch and Matcha - offering the best prices on all trades. It provides some UX perks (no gas costs for failed transactions!) and protects traders against MEV. - https://epicenter.rocks/cowswapThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/426

So welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and I'm here with Frederica Ernst. Today we're going to speak with Harry Halpin and Jaya Clara Brecki, who are the CEO and CSO of NIM. And NIM is like a really interesting privacy project that's trying to bring, you know, privacy to crypto and beyond that. And now before we go into that, just briefly on our sponsor. So first of all, we have Talley. So Talley is a

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So yeah, give CowSwap a try. You can also have benefits like no gas fees paid for failed transactions and optimized transaction management for multi-second dolls. So go over to cowswop.exchange and you can get started. So with that, let's go to our episode. Yeah, maybe just Harry and Jaya. Do you both want to introduce yourself a little bit? And, you know, how did you end up in this working in this crypto space and working on NIM?

So I could start. I'm the co-founder and CEO of NIM. And how we started is essentially, you know, I was involved in, to a large extent, two very disparate things for many years. I did my PhD in artificial intelligence in University of Edinburgh, and during my PhD and my work afterwards, I realized what small amount of data can be used to de-anonomize someone, particularly metadata. I became very concerned with this problem. I was personally kind of under surveillance due to a large amount of anarchists and climate change activism. And I ganged up with a bunch of friends of mine, including Jaya. We worked on European Commission funded projects, including one to build an early version of NIM, which is a mixnet, which is a sort of kind of system which can prevent nation state level surveillance.

And then when I saw various people, particularly like I remember the block stream raised very clearly in other raises, we said, well, look, we can actually pivot this mixnet technology. into a startup. So Binance through it, then Polychain through it, the A16 Z through in this year. And that's how we got where we are today. Tell us about the things that got you surveyed, Harry. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been a pretty wild, wild ride. I'm happy to talk to more of those things in detail. But why don't we have Jaya do a quick intro to herself? Yeah, happily. So my name is Jaya. and I got involved at NIM joined as CSO a few months ago before then I was working more on the kind of content, now more strategy side of things.

And as Harry mentioned, yeah, we worked together quite a few years ago and we're kind of in and out of various social movements even longer time ago. And so my, let's say, first kind of encounter with the crypto space was as part of one of these European Commission projects. namely one called DeScent, which was where I met a few people and read the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, and that was in probably 2012, so pretty early on. And it struck me immediately as a super interesting proposition because, you know, I think both Harry and myself have been involved in lots of movements that have been looking at questions of decentralization and power and technology for quite a long time. And here was a kind of new iteration of that that also started to look at the economics of some of these

questions. So that was super interesting to me. And I ended up writing a PhD that was a political analysis of Bitcoin and Ethereum looking at some of these dynamics. And then did a bit of work with Harry on NextLeep, another European Commission project, which was the precursor to NIM. And then I followed NIM's work for a while before joining the project. And yeah, I'm very happy to be part of this very exciting project. How did you get in trouble with the Oh, well, that's pretty simple. It's very hard not to get in trouble with the man. You know, what happened? This is all, I think, public record right now, is we were doing a lot of activism around what was considered a fringe issue at the time, which was climate change. Now it's somewhat socially acceptable to discuss it in public. In fact, there's even bizarre Netflix movies on it. And we were trying to draw public attention and concern to climate change issues. and what happened is I had an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy,

which is now the news assigned to me. And their job was essentially make my life very difficult as an organizer, which they were very successful at doing. They, you know, police even harassed my PhD advisor, came into my office at the university. I mean, it was pretty wild. There's a lot of at MIT and all sorts of other places. And yeah, I'm still on a blacklist, so I have trouble flying.

That being said, you know, the cop later revealed himself and the whole operation fell apart. But that made me realize how damaging, I think, surveillance can be in privacy violations. So it was not only myself. I mean, to be honest, I got off quite light. Being on a back blacklist is not really the end of the world, particularly if you've run your own company. But a lot of my friends really had their lives utterly destroyed for years, if not longer. And I think, and the important thing to realize is that no matter what you're doing, so you may think that you're just sending Bitcoin around, you may think I'm just enjoying some free yields on a D5 project,

you may think what you're doing is completely innocent legal lobbying. You know, if you really anger any of the kind of forces that be, be those corporate, the undercover cop was paid by actually oil corporations for a bit, or a government, you know, at some point they're going to want to shut you down. And when they want to shut you down, there is no law involved. They will do whatever it is they can to surveil your communication and to destroy. your relationships and they get you fired from your job and not maybe if you're in the Middle East, as several friends of mine were, put in jail and tortured. And so it's killed. And so, you know,

when you see the amount of devastation that surveillance was caused, it seemed natural that we should have tech. I mean, also, to be honest, I worked with Tim Berners-Lean. We saw all the policy-based approaches, the ending mass surveillance did not exactly succeed. It's still very much. In fact, maybe even it was legalized after the Snowden leaks. So, so, you know, it was an obvious move to sort of say, well, are there any technological fixes, and there's no simple technological fix, but is there any technological, let's say, self-defences that someone can use against surveillance? And it was very clear that when you're up against nation-state level adversaries, as I was,

current defenses aren't strong enough. And therefore, I sat down with my old friend. 2012, sat now with my old friend George Dinesis, who went on currently still at Nym, has had a sort of checkered pass with the company, who was working on MixNet, which is a technology that predates Tor. And he was working actually with the tour founders on an earlier mixnet called Mix Minion, which was probably the MixNet used by Satoshi Nakamoto even to hide his identity when he launched the Bitcoin White Paper. And that was because with George, I said, look, we should just revisit this and build a new MixNet, because I personally,

want to see this technology out there. And luckily, George, Anya, the rest of the NM team, design, built first under nonprofit funding and now under startup funding a new MixNet, which we think is kind of what we would call best to breed against very powerful global adversaries who can watch every bite coming in and out of a network. And it's not perfect. You know, it's not going to stop. A lot of things that hurt me, good old fashion, undercovers who, you know, whatever,

come to your house. I mean, obviously, your MixNet can't stop that. But I do think it will be a valuable tool in the future, not just for activists, but for everyone. Because, again, the main thing is when you get targeted, you don't think what you're doing is illegal. I definitely didn't think I would be targeted. But nonetheless, it will happen to you. And that's why it's important to have these technologies built in by default and widely available to everyone. like I think there is something so something really important to understand also about the difference between kind of surveillance as many people tend to think about it where it's like oh someone you know the state doesn't like someone and then they start looking at what they're doing and they kind of like you know send undercovers or whatever to their house and so on there's a slight difference between kind of that which is I think a common conception of surveillance and then what happens with mass surveillance and algorithmic surveillance where an actual fact

the behavior of everybody is gathered and scraped together in order to then be analyzed and then surface who is, you know, doing something abnormal and who should this state actually be looking at. And so, and I want to make that point, and I think it's very important to make that point, because so often, you know, when we talk about privacy and surveillance, people are like, oh, well, if I haven't done anything wrong, you know, why would this state come after me or so on and so forth? but when actually all of your digital activities online, you know, interact with everybody else's digital activities in a way that might harm others. So when you're being surveilled, it's not necessarily that it will harm you, but it will harm other people because you're part of setting a norm and thereby kind of like surfacing abnormal behavior or becoming a target in terms of, you know, everything from kind of credit rating to terrorism lists. So, you know, what we're talking about here is really like what mass surveillance does.

was at a kind of larger scale and at a kind of at the scale of society more generally and, you know, how that curbs the freedoms of society more generally. Yeah, like one, we did this end of year review episodes a few weeks ago and one of the things like I mentioned there, like I can think a little bit about. So if you, if you think of like crypto as this, you know, technology that, you know, threatens the, you know, existing powers, you know, like the nation states, the banks. And then if you want to kind of suppress that, right, as a nation state, then like, how would you do that?

I mean, it seems like one thing is if you look at the tax rules around crypto, it's like basically very confusing and nebulous and unclear for the most part. And then I think anyone who's now going to do like any defy, NFT stuff at scale is basically going to be like unable to I think file their taxes properly right because it's just super hard so I think that is actually you know in a way then it it will give this great leverage right because if you if you basically if everyone by default becomes like someone who you can potentially pin for because like oh you did this thing at that point and like was it properly filed well no so that Like, that's one way I could see this becoming, like, a big topic at some point.

You know, what do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, I could go quickly on that. I mean, so we have a NIM, because we're a surveillance company, a company that hopes to fight surveillance, that we realize that there's a lot of legal issues. Actually, ends up running a MixNet or VPN or Torluck system is perfectly legal. But what is definitely not clear, what's definitely gray zone is a lot of money. transfers, right? So you have giant list of countries and people, which are on America's blacklist. That's the OFAC list. You've got politically exposed persons. You have also different lists per country,

different rules per country. And blockchain technology has two issues that make it a gold mine for mass surveillance. One is everything's over the internet. So everything's naturally cross jurisdictional. And second, everyone self-surveils by putting all your transactions. of blockchain so we can prove that they happen. And that blockchain is a very useful source of data. And then combined that with mass surveillance, which is where most of the data of any kind is being sent, even off-chain data, as I say, lightning transactions and whatnot.

And you have an incredible source of data for any kind of legal prosecution. And you can remember, you often, sometimes, you know, you may not be prosecuted for what you think you're going to be prosecuted for. It should be remembered, for example, that, you know, they couldn't take Al Capone out for being part of the mafia, but I think they got them on taxes, and I remember correctly. You know, and that's what you call a parallel construction argument. Those are actually, we believe, quite common. There's some evidence our NIMS lawyer has actually used to pursue some of those cases around. He brought the first cases up to the U.S. court about mass surveillance being used for parallel construction arguments in the case of Guantanamo detainees, right? So they'll grab some random, you know, shepherd. from Afghanistan or something and say, hey, you're a part of Al-Qaeda. And, of course, he was actually just a shepherd, but they could kind of go through everyone's phone records and a cousin of a cousin of his brother's friends somehow communicated to someone

who was on a blacklist. And that can happen to anyone, not just that can happen in the United States. That can happen anywhere, any time. And I think these kinds of going off what I said, these mass surveillance combined with blockchain technology combined with lack of legal certainty and regular interregnesty are a gold mine for repression. And I honestly, look, I'm an American. I used to be at MIT.

I worked with Gary. I don't think that they are going to clarify these rules because why would you? If you clarify the rules about mass surveillance, if you clarify the rules about cryptocurrencies, that you lose ability to selectively prosecute people you don't like. And what nation state in their right mind would give that up? I sure wouldn't. I mean, and so I think this is a situation.

is actually going to get worse. I feel like we're actually in maybe a calm before the storm, particularly in terms of defy, where I think the U.S. government has kind of said, we don't care how many dumb foundations you have or weird DAWS or you think you're anonymous. We're going to pierce through all of that. We're going to make sure all the developers get adequately punished. And that's a, that's a, so we're entering a possibly really dangerous period in history for cryptocurrency, probably the most dangerous. And that's why I think technology like NIM is really needed. So, Jaya, I read a blog post penned by you in which you cite the Cipherpunk manifesto in that

transparency is for the powerful, privacies for the rest of us. So basically the second part kind of become super clear in the context of what you and Harry just talked about. Can you talk about the first part, transparency? for the powerful and how is how should we kind of transparency do we talk about here and who should count as powerful um yeah i think that's a that's a really good question like it's it's relatively easy to answer that question when we're talking about kind of traditional institutional um and governance frameworks where you have a kind of clear division between a public and a private

sector right where it's like okay people who hold uh you know public office office, people who make decisions that affect like broad parts of the population, they need to be held accountable for those decisions and for the actions that they're taking, right? Whether that's in public office or whether they work for a big company or, you know, whatever. So it's like that's, it's a pretty kind of easy topic to explain when we have kind of relatively clear power structures that are institutionalized. What I wrote that blog post about, however, was how to address that question when it comes to decentralized networks. And what I've found is that many times people's understanding of surveillance and privacy tends to be very crude. So they tend to think like either,

you know, we have privacy and then everything is private and anybody can do whatever they want. Or we have like complete surveillance, right? When in actual fact, that's not how infrastructures and architectures actually work. And that's not really how we would want them to work because, you know, if there is a kind of like, blanket privacy, then, you know, you very quickly tend to see power grabs that then remain invisible and people who have inordinate decision-making power that affect other people and that can no longer be held accountable. So how do you deal with that in supposedly decentralized infrastructures and architectures? And so here, the kind of argument that I put forward in that

blog post is, you know, who is the powerful in this case when we're talking about a decentralized network? Well, it is the protocol and the network itself, right? That we're or the technical organization of the network. And so therefore, you know, people that are running core parts of that infrastructure need to be able to, you know, need to be known and need to be held accountable. And so in our case, we're talking about node runners. And this extends a little bit further. And I don't mean node runners in terms of the private people that, you know, behind running the

nodes, but I'm talking about the actual nodes themselves. So, and this extends to also questions of information security. So I've been having long conversations with Claudia Diaz, our chief scientist at NIM, who designs a lot of the, both the kind of token economics and the security side of the infrastructure and of the MixNet. And she talks about this a lot too, and she wrote a paper that was looking at how to verify the location of nodes. And, you know, we were very quickly conscious of the fact that, like, for a lot of people who think about, about, you know, privacy and surveillance, you know, the idea of being able to verify the IP address or the exact kind of geolocation of a node sounds like, you know, sounds like surveillance. It sounds

like a kind of like, you know, we're spying on the whole network or whatever. But actually, like, when you think about it in this kind of term, we need to know the location of the nodes in order to understand that the network is sufficiently decentralized across geographies in order to be able to assess the security parameters of the MixNet and know that nodes are not colluding, right? And we need to do that in order to secure the privacy of the end user. And so here the kind of, you know, I hope that I'm making myself clear that fundamentally it's a kind of extension of the original cypherpunk saying of transparency for the powerful privacy for the rest of us, but an extension of that into a context of where we're operating with decentralized

networks. Yeah, I'll just add a little, I'll jump in here really quickly. I mean, it's very important to remember that the purpose of that. The purpose of the, of NIM is to provision anonymous communication and privacy to end users. That's the goal. And a lot of our goal is not to make node runners themselves, MixNodes, hide their IP address. They're doing the work that's rewarded to help, and we can maybe discuss when a MixNet is soon, to help users get privacy. And the people that have the power network, and we're seeing this, you know, Dow's with developers, increased transparency and governance, protocol changes and upgrades. These are all things that, you know, I'm very interested in.

A little bit skeptical in some DAOs, but overall, I think the mood, at least that the thought, the heart is in the right place. These are things which are necessary in order to build a real privacy enhancing network. So let's take the example of Tor or a lot of other networks where, you know, you have a lot of users in the U.S., all the node runners are in Germany. So you're just shuffling packets between the U.S. and Germany, then back to the U.S. where all Silicon Valley is, that's not very great. Wouldn't it be wonderful or better if we could guarantee that your, for example, as was done in early versions of WikiLeaks, that your packets went through multiple jurisdictions. That would be great. But we can't do that unless we know, we don't want

to know the identity of the node operas, but we can't do that unless we know where their actual IP addresses and where their machine is. So, you know, we could sort of say we could guarantee that, for example, you know, a piece of traffic that's going, that's very important, goes through not just Germany in the U.S., but also, for example, could go through Iceland or could go through Switzerland. And that's really important to do in a very practical sense. Likewise, we also need transparency and we need other technology that increases transparency like reproducible builds in order. that users can trust our technology and that if I get, you know, rubber hose attack, I get kidnapped, Jaya gets kidnapped. One of our developers goes rogue and decides to put it back north because you guys out there, the in-users can catch it. That's, again, another good reason

to push open source. And then make sure that no matter what happens, the network is fully functional and there's no dependencies on the team or, and we have enough technical safeguards that no group of node runners can control and corrupt the network. Maybe this is like a little bit of a detour, but just something that came up. That was like, I thought it was very interesting. So there's this guy. I don't know if you remember him, but it is James DiAngelo. He made this like really fantastic Bitcoin videos like a long, long time ago, like eight years ago or something, seven years ago.

But I remember one of the things that he kind of, he then sort of stopped working on Bitcoin. and he started this research basically on like transparency. And his argument that he was making was that actually transparency was something that was used to corrupt a lot like U.S. politics. Right. Where you basically have like, you know, in the Senate or in the Congress, you know, people would like vote a certain way. And then you'd have all of these organizations who would be like, okay, no, we need to, you know, these interest groups who then would basically give your nation. based on like some voting records and we're basically able to like use that data effectively to sort of corrupt that process.

I'm curious if you have any like thoughts on this idea. I mean, I don't know the specifics of that story, but I do think that there is a lot that still needs to that needs to be worked out in terms of how the dynamics around transparency and privacy operate, especially going forward into the kind of Web3 space. Harry kind of touched on it a little bit earlier. Like there is some, let's say, there is some kind of industry standards that have kind of emerged around this stuff. So like it's fairly kind of commonly agreed upon that, you know, code needs to be transparent, right?

Open source is kind of like, it's pretty important. People understand the security reasons for that. And there's also kind of accountability reasons for that, right? It's like how is this thing actually, you know, how does this thing, how, you know, what does the code look like of this, you know, key infrastructure that I'm actually depending on? So there are certain kinds of, let's say, norms and standards and ways of doing things that are emerging in and around the Web3 space. But on the question of kind of transparent ledgers and on, you know, node operators and all this kind of stuff,

there's a lot of, like, murky stuff that hasn't quite been worked out yet. You know, where is the line between surveillance and privacy? where is the line between surveillance and accountability? You know, it's kind of, this is stuff that needs to be really kind of thought through in some detail. And I think this coming, I think this coming year, I mean, with the kind of like boom of Web 3 that we've been seeing recently, I think with this coming year, I think with this coming year, we're going to see privacy really become kind of one of the core parts of the conversation, one of the kind of core topics in the debate. And back to the government issue, I mean, I find it hilarious. So I'm visiting the United States and all of my friends here in the wonderful world of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are really talking about how they really are going to have to lobby the U.S. government. And we're not going to touch the U.S.

That's our NIM doesn't touch the U.S. That's one of our primary objectives, actually, in existence. However, you know, I said, well, how are you going to lobby the U.S. government? And they said, oh, we're just going to like, you know, pay campaign. donations to a group of random senators and representatives. I was like, wow. And I was discussing this actually with my friends in the Middle East. They said, you know, in the Middle East, the U.S. media would just call that corruption.

You know, they, well, you don't, you know, if you, if you, if I say, hey, would it be great if you passed this law here is 50K. And this law saves me billions or, you know, half billions of dollars. That's, that's corruption. that's not really, I mean, lobbying is a very nice sounding word, but that's not. And I honestly don't think, I mean, maybe I've lived in Europe too long, but I don't think that happens in Europe, at least not to the same extent I see it in the U.S. Jaya can remind me, but I've never heard of this kind of lobbying, at least in Switzerland or France, which is where I've primarily been. I'm pretty sure it's illegal. But it's normalized the U.S. and the U.S. has some virtue signaling around it. It would say, oh, it's just lobbying, da, and I'm glad, you know, to be honest, if I were a U.S. blockchain company, I would. be very worried I'd be doing it too. But that being said, the fact that governments themselves can be so heavily influenced by existing wealthy powers. And of course, obviously, the traditional banking sector is probably one of the most wealthiest powers imaginable. I think it bodes very

poorly for the future of the United States in general. I don't see a difference between. between the US government, how they deal with lobbying corruption in what they would call some third world third rate government. I think it's basically the same. And I hope at some point the U.S. government actually gets its act together and purges all this corruption out of the system. As a European, I can assure you similar things happen in Europe. And I mean, usually it's not $50,000 against a piece of legislations.

legislation, but it's mostly a little bit more, well, less overt. So basically it's kind of like ingratiating yourself and basically giving people talking points so they can look knowledgeable and so on. But it absolutely happens here. I think it happens everywhere in the world. But I mean, zooming out a bit again, it seems there is a, very dedicated group of people who are whose aim it is to protect our privacy online. But to me, this actually starkly contrasts with what probably 98% of internet users actually act like, right? So almost

everyone doesn't give a second thought to the data trail they leave behind on the internet. So do you think that this is a fringe movement, kind of like the climate change activism you were involved in in the past, that's going to make it to the mainstream? Or do you think this is something

do you think people will start to care that they give their data to Google and Facebook and you know, are the other large corporations that mine it? Or do you think this will have to this will stay

this will stay like a pet peeve for a small vocal group of privacy defenders. I'm happy to take this, Harry. So I think we can see from the downloads of Signal app last year that people absolutely do care. The problem is not whether people care. The problem is that it's actually really difficult to defend your privacy online as an individual user in the current infrastructure setup. And so what NIM, you know, aims to do is to really kind of protect communications at the network layer, right?

So we're not kind of like going to provide yet another tool to a user who feels a little bit paranoid to try and kind of patch up a leaking system is really to try and kind of address some of the problems at the kind of deep infrastructure layer. So that's the kind of, you know, that's how NIM positions ourselves and which also means that, you know, we would sit, you know, the mix net would sit under. applications like Signal and other kind of privacy applications. I do not think that privacy is going to remain a pet peeve. I think actually it's going to be one of the main topics going forward in the next year

and for some really important reasons. First of all, the COVID pandemic has been going on for a couple of years now, which means that pretty much every single activity that we do as humans currently now takes place via digital infrastructures. and that includes, you know, school, shopping, you know, all the way through to probably sex and everything in between, right? So what that means is that, you know, we actually are more exposed to surveillance than we have ever been before. And I think that's going to start to dawn on people. So that's kind of on the bigger scale.

And then I think some of the kind of, as I mentioned earlier, I think some of the privacy issues with Web3 are really going to start to come to the foreground. We've seen people like Moxie already write posts about. this and you know there's more and more debates in the web three space around privacy and then and then finally oh so you know payments you know cash is disappearing almost all payments are becoming digital so the question of kind of economic and financial surveillance is going to start to become more and more apparent to people as well as they start to see you know everything from their credit records to you know who knows what you know start to be affected by economic surveillance and And it's something that, you know, we can even talk about this across different types of bodies, right?

So one thing is like whether the individual cares, and I think the individual absolutely does care. You can see that in the amount of Netflix TV series that are coming out about Facebook and various other kind of big tech surveillance driven platforms. But I think, you know, also more importantly, companies and organizations are really going to start to care, you know, corporate surveillance and so on. And all the way through to governments, you know, like the conundrum that governments have is basically like how to balance, you know, keeping, you know, national communication infrastructure is secure, but then governments are always trying to sneak in a back door, which actually like fucks up their security anyway. And so, you know, what we really need is a solution that cuts across all these diverse actors and that do not have that kind of like the problem of having some kind of inherent interest in surveilling others, which is the problem of governments and the problem of corporations. operations. And that's why NIM is decentralized and that's why NIM is trying to operate at the infrastructure layer rather than just offering yet another patch to a leaking system for an end user. So let's talk about NIM. So let's talk about the infrastructure that you guys provide. Can you

maybe describe in a nutshell what NIM sets out to do and how it sets out to do that and then we can kind of delve deeper into the details? Yeah, sure. Essentially, imagine that you have an entity's, an adversary, an enemy that is watching your every move. It's a bit like that 80s song, right? Every move you make on the internet. They're watching every packet that comes in and out of the network. How would you defend against that?

So you could say, oh, don't worry, we'll just use the VPN. but, you know, if the adversary can watch all the packets coming in the VPN and all the packets coming out the VPN, so they essentially get a kind of fingerprint, not just with the IP address, but the timing and the volume, the kind of pattern of those packets. So VPNs don't work. And, you know, Tor is much, much better than VPN, but you can kind of run the same attack on Tor. You can say look at all the packets coming into Tor and Trino, look at all the packets coming out, the exit node. And we can do some machine learning on those and figure out what street. of packets is coming from which user.

So then the question is, how would you defend against someone who's watching all your packets and who's watching everyone you might be talking to these packets? How would you defend against such a powerful enemy? And the answer is actually pretty intuitive, which is you have just like Tor, you have nodes in between, you give your packets to someone else, other people give those packets to someone else. That person, if you imagine the packets are like a deck of cards, they mix the packets up. why it's called a mixnet. You know, you can imagine it like shuffling a deck of cards,

if you're a mathematician, a random permutation. And then they release those packets, in our case, using a statistical process called a bason process. Other people have different takes on it. And those packets are then mixed up. So they're not coming in and out the node in the same order. Then they go to other nodes. And they continue to mix those packets up. And after a little bit of mixing, even an adversary, which is watching the entire network with this God's eye view, can't figure out who sent what packet to what person. And so that is honestly, currently the most scalable defense against master advances we have today.

And that's what NIM is. NIM is a mixed net. It's composed of servers, nodes, which mix packets on behalf of users. Now, the big question with mixed nets, and mixed nets are not new. They predate Bitcoin. Adam back was commercialized in with zero knowledge systems before he founded Blockstream. Cypherpunks probably said we're using early MixNets like MixMaster and Mixit Minion to disguise their email. So they've been around a while.

But the problem that afflicts mixed mixed nets is where do you get all these people to run? How do you get all these people to run nodes? That's a really good question because you're assuming a decentralized network. The security and the privacy is dependent on having multiple independent parties. running these nodes. And so obviously we can take the lessons that we've learned from Bitcoin and apply those to Mix Network. We can say, well, can we reward mixed networks using a kind of reputation token to say,

look, this Mix node is really doing his job mixing. This other guy, he's just dropping all of his packets. That's what NIM does. So NIMT takes a mixed network design, a particular design called Lupix, built by George and Anya, who are both now at NIM. And we improve upon it. And one way we improve upon it is we add an incentive layer on top, which is built on essentially a reputation tracking mechanism.

And that is the provision, this kind of privacy that MixNet's give you with also high quality of service and the mix net's kind of fast and reliable. And people that can't run MixNodes very well eventually carry less and less traffic over time. And those that do mix traffic correctly and fast get more and more. rewards. And we think that's, we think this is actually quite a large breakthrough. This system has not quite been developed before. And although there's some other things, options of the space, and we really look forward to launching it at main net pretty soon. So can you also talk a little bit about, you know, like the use cases? Like how like once name is life and functions

well, like what are some of the ways that you see people interacting and using, interacting with and using NIM. I mean, in the ideal world, you wouldn't have to know about it because your wallet, for example, your Monaro wallet, your Zcash wallet, your Bitcoin wallet, your liquid Bitcoin wallet, probably for some privacy on chain, would know about NIM and would just run NIM automatically, just as when you download Tor browser, you're using Tor automatically. Now, obviously, that's not the case right now, but we are going to build infrastructure such that people can't easily plug in. Currently, if you're a power user, NIM uses the same kind of SOX-5 interfaces tour, you can just go into Keybase or Firefox and kind of plug in. You can start a NIM

client on your machine and plug that local gateway IPs address into your configuration. You can run apps through NIM through the test net right now. In the future, we'd like to see a number of applications actually natively integrate NIM. I've discussed it with Moxie from Signal. Of course, very skeptical in the decentralization aspects. You know, we could imagine, I think instant messaging is a great use case for NIM. Surprisingly, you know, there's been previous work, which seems to point to the fact that things where a few packets being dropped are kind of okay would also be good for mixed nets. So this would include voice and audio.

Voice over the Internet is pretty good. Maybe even video over the Internet, things that can buffer. Things that aren't very good for NIM. It's probably web browsing. I think Tor is probably the best option you have right now. I don't really see that changing anytime, particularly soon. So I use Tor every day. And Tor is more optimized for things like web browsing where you have large amounts of pockets,

packets being streamed through in a synchronous manner. And mix-nets because this mixing process is a little bit more latency and it's better for apps that have a more asynchronous message-based approach to traffic. So hopefully this stuff's just built in by default. We'll let users use it and add it to apps as they see fit, just as they can currently do with Tor. And we eventually hope that privacy enhanced apps take network privacy seriously. Currently, to our knowledge, almost no one does accept Tor. And that they build them directly into their applications.

So as I understand it, there are two key improvements here, right? So basically, one is the fact that every path. package is independently routed and thus reordered, kind of making it harder to figure out that they kind of belong together. And the other thing is that there's an incentive layer added, right? There's one counterintuitive point insofar as that we allow you to add fake traffic as well. So let's say none of people use the network. You still want your packets to be anonymous. we can basically add a fake cover dummy, whatever you want to call it, traffic into the system to guarantee certain levels of nominee even as not enough users.

Now, the great thing with NEM is thanks to the way that we built our network statistically, the more people that use the network counterintuitively, the faster the network gets, the less covered traffic you need. If you want to be anonymous as a giant crowd of people using the network, that you don't need that much cover traffic. You can actually mix those packets for a less amount of time, while maintaining the same amount of privacy. That's not the case.

So we kind of, with blockchain systems, we're essentially the way to think about blockchain systems, it's kind of an auction for a finite amount of a block space. So we kind of scale like web servers, you know, more traffic comes in. Great. We can add more mixed nodes. And I'll let Jaya explain the incentive system here in a second. But I do want to point out that's not just independently routing and mixing the packets.

It's also adding fake traffic and balancing that fake traffic. and the amount of mixing so we can achieve scalability and high quality of service. Jai, do you want to just take over on the incentive stuff real quick? Yeah, sure. I'm just trying to kind of think, looping back on Frederica's question on, like, the improvements. I guess, yeah, we've been kind of like laying out a lot of the kind of like technical details, but I wanted to kind of make it a little bit, maybe a bit more clear for kind of non-technical audiences, what the improvement really is here.

So, you know, it's almost like you got to think of kind of like, you know, the stack in layers. And so where you might have a wallet or a messaging application and so on that might have kind of like end to end encryption. So, you know, we're seeing this a lot. And like also to speak to your earlier question of like whether people actually care, you know, once you start seeing like what's up, try to start to advertise that their privacy friendly, they'd have end to end encryption and so on. Then you know that, okay, this is something that people are aware of privacy. is something that actually people care about. But what's important to understand is that even when the message is encrypted,

the actual metadata and the patterns of communications are still visible. And that can actually reveal a lot more than people normally think. So it can reveal, you know, where you're located, who you're speaking to, how often you're speaking to them, what time of a day, which can reveal a lot about your relationship to that person. So say you're sending a message to one person at 11 o'clock at night every single day, then that's a very different type of relationship than if you're sending a message to someone,

you know, at 10 in the morning or whatever. So it's like there's a lot of important information that is revealed and that is, in fact, as Claudia Diaz also likes to say, is in fact a lot more kind of machine readable that gets revealed, you know, rather than the content of the message. And so what NIM does is it adds that kind of,

you know, a deeper layer of protection to communications that does not allow for, surveillance of the patterns of communication and the metadata of communication. So that's the kind of major improvement to existing private messaging apps or wallets and so on. That makes a lot of sense. You said that NIM can be used as a service for all kinds of applications, right? So basically, blockchain and non-blockchain-based. So can you maybe go into how?

how NIM works together with other applications. So basically, what's the interface like? Yeah. So, I mean, I think I kind of lean towards that earlier. You know, NIM was originally not built with blockchain applications in mind. It was built with people that wanted, including European governments, that wanted to avoid NSA surveillance in mind. And so the way you're going to think about it,

just as any application can run over VPN. And if you're clever enough, any application can run over TOR, any application, internet application can have its packets mixed by NIM. Any application can run over NIM. In detail, how that works is that just like TOR or VP. You have to install a local client. That client has a library that kind of starts that process out for you. That connects to the MixNet.

That application, your application that you want to use them has to somehow talk to that library. Currently, there's a standardized protocol that's also used by VPNs and Tor called SOX5, and we just support that protocol at the box. So in a lot of applications, there's a way to kind of natively run your traffic through SOC5 proxies. And that's so things that were built without NIM, even knowing about NIM, again, Keybase, Firefox, and these sort of apps come to mind can easily plug into NIM today, which is quite nice. So, you know, it's not just a dream in a white paper. It's actually a real working code thanks to our excellent dev team.

He's been working around the clock for three years on this. And so that being said, there's nothing to prevent an application developer from what we call natively binding to them. So that means they can actually just sort of add that library into their application, bundle it with their applications. So you don't even think about it when you install that application. And, you know, in order because we imagine a quite diverse number of applications wanting network level privacy, This is, you know, not just blockchain apps, but everyone. We've also built in a truly diverse, a diverse amount of ways to pay for them.

So nothing is free in this world, but we try to make NIM as free as possible and allow people be very flexible. So, for example, you know, no one's going to pay for instant messaging. That's crazy. I definitely want it. But we can imagine that instant messaging applications,

you know, telegrams, signal, and whatnot that are interested in them can just sort of, you know, use it in both. for all of their users and they essentially just kind of purchase some bandwidth on NIM in bulk for all their users at once and then for the user it's just free. People that use Bitcoin, power users, might want to, for example, you know, whenever you use Bitcoin, you have a little transaction fee. You can imagine a sort of similar model being approached with NIM where you pay a little privacy fee to keep your network level data private.

And, you know, honestly, we build a very open-ended system in this. regard so that not only can many different apps plug into them in very different ways, including native bindings and proxy bindings and standardized bindings. So it's really up to the developer, even the power user, how they want to plug into them. We've also made it super easy for people to pay for them in whatever way they want. So I don't want people to have to do something sketchy with an exchange just to use them. I think that's crazy. And that's blocking a lot of quote unquote web three projects. If I'm using them with a Bitcoin wallet, I want to pay for NAM using just a little bit

Bitcoin and maybe an API call. I think that's how most people who use Bitcoin wallets, for example, we're in track with them. Let's talk about the business site in a little bit. I'm still not 100% sure on how it works. So maybe if I give an example, so basically say I have 500 packets, packets that I want to send to Brian, right? So basically, so I would, whom would I, so basically would my application that I wanted to send this out of already kind of distribute this to different

nodes or do I have to send it to an initial node first and they kind of split it up? Because if I, if I have to send everything to an initial node, then it's, it's immediately clear that all of those come from me, right? So at least that note would know. And if you surveyed all traffic, you could also know. Yeah, so how NIM works is that I download some client software. It's important when you send traffic through NIM that each packet is encrypted in the same size and looks just like every other packet. Otherwise, you could identify them.

So these packets are essentially your whatever, let's say your 500 packets. They're all made into, let's say they're made into a thousand sphinx packets, which is this format that we use to make all the packets identical. That's done locally. on your machine by a client of what's called the NIM client. Now, the NIM client then wants to talk to the NIMX network. Now, there's two ways to do that. The first hop in the network, which is obviously the most veritable, is called the gateway. So you could go to public gateway, which could be just like a VPN provider, could be the app, could have the gateway built in. Or if you're pretty paranoid,

you don't want anyone to know your IP, you can run your own gateway. You can run it on a raspberry pie or whatever in your house on your, on your machine, your desktop machine, probably that's something you want to turn on an awful lot. And those packets go to the first hop into the network, which is called the gateway. That gateway then ask a blockchain, a directory authority system for where's all the mix nodes. You know, and that's given to the client software. The client software, each time it's building the packet also builds an independent path for that packet through the network.

And that packet, that path is not revealed. It's encrypted in such a way that only the next hop, just like Tor is revealed at every hop. So you can imagine you have 500 packets. You build a thousand sphinx packets. Inside of each thing's packet is a encrypted route. Those packets are then shipped with some sort of timing delay, which is again statistically chosen via a fair process, to a gateway that.

then ships it to the next hop in the path. That hop is to a mixed node. And it goes through one mixed node. It goes through two mixed nodes. Currently goes through three mixed nodes. And then it comes out. And at the last hop, because again, you told the packets when you were making them where they're going.

They know where they're going. It's just the people that can view them can't see where they're going. The last hop, kind of just like in a taking the peels off an onion and onion encryption takes that final layer of encryption off. It sees the address, the IP address of where that packet should be going, that packet sent to the gateway or the exit node you can think of it, that goes to that application or Bob or whoever it is you're sending the packet to. So again, nodes are bundled locally.

They're all made identical. They're given their path locally in unbiased, and fair way, using verifiable random functions, other kind of cool crypto. Sent through the network. when they go through the network, the mixed nodes themselves, they only know, they don't know who sent it, they don't know where it's going, they only see the hop it came from the next hop.

That's why you go through three mixed nodes. And that's why you go through five hops in general. So you have a local client says the gateway, three mixed nodes, final gateway, then the Bob or whoever your application is at the end. And you think this would be very slow, but actually you can get good anonymity by just a few seconds, up to, you know, definitely minutes,

but also second. through this process. This process can be done pretty quickly thanks to the wonders of high-speed modern cryptography. Is that more clear? It's a bit more detail that I was expecting to give on a podcast. Yeah. Okay, great. So just one question here. Because you're basically like mixing up the order potentially right now. I think if you send something like a crypto transaction, like, okay, this makes like obviously makes sense to me. But I wonder, you know, like are there particular types. I mean, you mentioned before, I think, like, web browsing is something that wouldn't work well? Is that correct? Or, like, you know, what are the types of application

that, like, this works for? And, like, what are the things that are basically, like, this isn't as suitable for? A lot of people talk about NIM versus TOR, but I do think, you know, there are certain applications where mixed that to add too much latency and shipping packets in and out of order don't really make sense. So things like web browsing, for example. I think TOR is a great solution for web browsing. However, you have to remember that this gateway essentially is taking the sphinx packets in, buffering them and reassembling them. So even if the packets come in and out of order, you know, if you're seeing enough

packets through, they kind of get buffered, then decrypted and sent to the client. Sorry, that's actually done on the client, not the gateway. And that that makes them suitable for certain kinds of applications, cryptocurrency, as you mentioned earlier, instant messaging, but also things that you, where it's okay for things to be a bit slow and to buffer or for occasional packets to get lost. I can do an audio or video call with you and some

packets can get dropped. You lose some of the quality but you can still do the call and I think mixed that would work for that. Also, you know, I may be uploading or downloading a giant file. Obviously it seems going to be a little bit slow to use it with a mixnet. But again, I might not need

to upload and download that file in a few seconds. I can wait a few minutes for that file to be chunked up and sent through a mixnet. Net. That being said, web browsing really is the hard problem, and I think for the foreseeable future, it will, Tor will be better for web browsing. It's not theoretically impossible to send web browsing traffic through a mixed net. In fact, we've done it. We have instructions on how to do it on our website if you're interested in doing it with Firefox. It's just that it's kind of slow and it's not, I think, the ideal, it's not an ideal mechanism. One thing to note with

them, which is sort of interesting, I actually forgot mentions earlier, is that different applications We'll have different kind of, there's kind of a trade option, how fast you want to go and how anonymous you want to be. And we actually let the user and the application choose that level. We'll have some defaults reinforced. But, you know, you can say, I don't really care about that. This is like a, this is a super private Bitcoin transaction. So I want this to take, like, I'm okay if it takes like a day to go through because it's really important that remains private. And we can support that.

But we can also sort of say, hey, I'm just, I want some privacy, but I'm also would like. to do an audio or video call with Epicenter. This isn't super, you know, it's going to be public, so it's not super important that I keep this 100% anonymous. And we also will support that kind of application as well. But I think what's also, and what's fun about that point is that those different applications, you know, all of them together in the same mix net actually enhances the security of each other because of the timing of this case. So it's, you know, the multiple different types of application use is actually to the benefit of everyone. on. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Can we talk about the incentivization that goes on top? So basically, if you look at

traditional privacy systems like Tor, as far as I understand, that Tor is donation based, and NIM kind of has this in-build incentivization layer, right? So basically, there's a token and everything. Can you explain how that works? Yes, I'll be happy to explain. how that works. Yeah, so we have a utility token in NIM, which is called NIM. And at a very basic level, the system is designed to incentivize mix nodes to do the work of mixing data packets and not only to do the work, but to do it well. So the intention is to incentivize good quality of service rather than just mixing. So the way that that happens is that the system is kind of like quite kind of uniquely democratic in a sense, because the performance of each mixed node is

measured in the reputation, in the community reputation. So how that works is that anybody who holds NIM tokens can actually delegate stake to a mix node that they believe are going to perform good work, good work of mixing. And if they do perform good work of mixing, that mix node will get rewarded in NIM. And then the people who have delegated to that mixed node will receive a share of that reward. So the way that the incentives works in this case then is that people who hold NIM are incentivized to delegate to nodes that perform well. Nodes are incentivized to perform well because then they'll receive more delegations. And the more delegations that they receive, the more likely they are to be selected to continue doing the mixing for the network.

So that's a kind of like brief sketch, the brief kind of overview of the reward system. But what's nice about it is that, you know, you can have different levels of expertise come in here, you know, where those running nodes might have, you know, a bit more kind of expertise in how to kind of set up a well-functioning node. But in actual fact, anybody who holds NIM tokens can participate in ensuring that the network operates well. And this is, right, this is like a cosmos SDK network. right is my understanding no so is uh does it mean basically like all of the mix node operators are also validators of the proof of stake network or are these like decoupled functions so these are decoupled functions so essentially you have to kind of think about it as like um almost almost two

separate systems i mean that are very integrated but um kind of two separate systems so the mix net with the mixed nodes you know operate the mix net um and And then separately to that, you know, and the mixnet makes use of a Cosmos blockchain, which is then operated by a set of validators. The set of validators currently is a permission set, but we're going to be de-permissioning later this year. And it's a permission set because it is a core aspect to the infrastructure. So we're trying to kind of like match that to real skin in the game in the real world.

Is there a cap on how much traffic can go through any individual node? So basically if a node is a fantastic mixer and who is available, is there a way to guard against emerging centralization? Yeah. So in actual fact, there is a certain amount, there's a certain number of mixed nodes that need to be present in the mix net for every time period, every epoch, so to speak. And that's calculated partially on the basis of how many bandwidth credentials have been purchased. just with NIM tokens. So it's a kind of measure of what is the demand going to be like for the next epoch, right? Which will then calculate how many mixed nodes do we need.

And those mixed nodes are distributed across three layers. There is an equal amount of traffic going through every mixed node per epoch, basically. So in that sense, there won't ever be centralization. And there's another element to counsel the centralization, which means that essentially your, you know, know, the total amount of delegations that you receive as a node, you know, will increase the likelihood of your selection for the next round, but only up to a certain point. So there's what's called a soft cap after which, you know, it won't make much difference if like, you know, 20,000 more people delegate to you. Yeah. So there's, there's inbuilt kind of, let's say,

resistance to centralization. And what's the state of this today? So I understand you have a test net live, right? Yeah, so we, just before everyone broke up for the holiday, we launched our permanent test net called Sandbox, which mimics all the kind of main net smart contracts and intensive schemes. And, yeah, and people are more than welcome to get involved and try it out. It's very important for us to kind of give, to allow people to kind of try out running nodes and test out the reward systems and try building things on NIM before they actually kind of get involved in the main net.

So we welcome everyone to have a look at Sandbox. Final topic we wanted to ask about. So, you know, you were on the podcast before where the topic was like about Julian Assange. And actually, we did a podcast just before the holidays with Amir Taki. and some of his co-founders. And then we talked a little bit about the two, and he mentioned that there was some sort of Assange Dao. So I was just curious, like, what's the update on this?

Is it still something like you're involved in? And, you know, like, what's going on there? Oh, I can give a quick update on that. Yeah, so I'm old friends with Julian and eventually, his family. Actually, there's a quite funny story when I was having all my problems due to climate change activism. I went to see the WikiLeaks launch. I think it was like 2008 or nine at a chaos computer Congress that was still in Berlin. And I said to the WikiLeaks folks, I said, look, you're all going to go to jail. And I remember one of them said, you know, we're not

dissidents. We just create tools for dissidents. I said, I don't think the FBI is going to see it that way. and I believe I was right. And then, you know, I felt quite bad about, you know, no one is perfect. Obviously, Julian is not perfect. I'm certainly not perfect. But therefore, you know, no one particularly for releasing truthful information, deserves to be imprisoned and tortured. So, you know, I visited Julian Embassy and we would discuss lots of topics.

To be honest, he was pretty depressed sometimes. And I would say, well, look, this black. chain stuff, you know, these people from Bitcoin, you know, the CryptoKitties people, whatever you want to call it, they're actually doing really amazing stuff. There's a new, a new social movement happening here. And honestly, he was a little bit skeptical, but he got into it. And, you know, when they finally, I was, I visited the embassy, I think it was the last person on the guest list before they closed the guest list. And then two or three months later, they busted and took him out, put him in prison. And so I always felt a little bit of a personal response.

ability to Julian. Now, you know, I mean, we philosophically disagree on some points. I don't believe information. Information may be necessary to help freedom, but, you know, human freedom is caused by human social movements and human people, not by technology. Technology can help those social movements. But nonetheless, I think Julian did a remarkable job and building some crucial parts technology and releasing a number of very true, true things, ending a really bloody war in Iraq, and therefore I believe deserves to be supported. And, you know, it's really hard to support, you know, particularly in the cryptocurrency space, you think that there would be tons of donations and whatnot, but there kind of isn't. You know, most people that have Bitcoin would like to

hold it so they get more rich. And so I went with Julian's father to Bitcoin Conference, Miami. me. I don't think Julian's father was particularly successful in fundraising at that event. But then we saw all this crazy NFT stuff happening where people were selling NFTs for lots of money. And I was shocked. I don't own any NFTs. I don't even own any Ethereum. So I don't, to be honest, it's a separate world for me. I feel a bit old-fashioned. But regardless, I do believe that one of the best things that could happen for Julian would be if he could raise the money to pay his lawyers and get out. And I believe that will hopefully happen. And I believe the family is working on some sort of NFT sale. And of course, just as we've seen in previous sales, Dow's have arisen to help Julian,

to help and to work on his kind of NFT auction. Now, you know, I'm not part of the Dow, I just connected the Dow, the people who are in it, with his family because they're friends of mine and I don't want to see Julian Rod in jail. And I do think that I would like to, regardless of what people think about WikiLeaks per se, I think is great, but I understand if some people don't, no one deserves to be imprisoned and die in jail for releasing information. You know, I had a previous friend of mine, Aaron Schwartz, driven to suicide over this when he released what was actually publicly information about the U.S. court system, what's called the PACER database, and then later they kind of blackmailed him over open access data, which now we're seeing as super useful for the world in the form of LibGen. And I think we're going to see more and more of these cases. And I would actually, you know, I mean, regardless of how you feel about the details of each individual cases, I would actually see.

like to see lots of Dow's form for generically supporting political prisoners, particularly political prison on cryptography, but also wider political prisoners who are fighting for human freedom. So this is not just, you know, Virgil Griffith, obviously, was victimized by the U.S. state. I can imagine there'll be plenty more in the future. And so I think I really want to support this kind of movement. Because to be honest, everyone is talking about funding public.

goods, but one of the public goods that we all take advantage of and we don't even think about is the fact that we are free. We are not imprisoned in a room unless you're in a COVID lockdown. And we are able to kind of talk to every we want to, when we want to. And I think that fundamental freedom should be upheld. And there will be a lot more court cases in the future. So I would like to see the crypto community become more generous and fight for our common freedom. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Harry and Jaya. I think that's a great place to wrap up.

And it was really a pleasure to, yeah, speak with you both about NIM. I'm excited to see, like, where it's going to go. And I think it's, yeah, very needed, definitely. So I hope it's going to be part of lots of crypto wallets and messaging app soon. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about NIM before saying goodbye is that I think there are many things. things needed in crypto. And the way to think about them is they're like, each component is like a finger that can make a fist and that fist can kind of fight for our freedom. And NIM is just one very small finger. But we think it's an important one is one that no one is built, is one that should be built. I do look forward to hearing what everyone else is building and I'll

keep listening to your podcast. So thanks a lot. Where can people come to find out more about NIM and get involved? Yeah. So thanks very much for having us on the podcast. And I would very much invite people to keep following our project. We will be, we are, have already slowly begun to launch the MixNet and take the steps towards mainnet, which will come very, very soon. So yeah, you can follow us on, you know, Telegram and Twitter, the usual channels. And of course, our website. So keep an eye. Cool. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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