# Nym VPN - Harry Halpin | ETHDam III - 2025 - Speakers: [Harry Halpin](https://streameth.org/speakers/harry-halpin) - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 20:38 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-EZQaXGKCvb0 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZQaXGKCvb0 ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Nym VPN - Harry Halpin | ETHDam III - 2025 🎀 About the Speaker: Harry Halpin is the founder and CEO of Nym Technologies. We created NymVPN, the first decentralized privacy-enhanced mixnet that is as easy-to-use as VPN. He taught cryptocurrency at American University of Beirut during their hyperinflation crisis, and has a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. Previously he led academic and standards work at W3C/MIT and Inria de Paris. 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/harryhalpin https://nym.com/ https://x.com/nymproject ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 Opening Remarks 1:45 Metadata Is the Real Privacy Risk 3:10 Mixnet Architecture & Cover Traffic 4:45 Anonymous Credentials & Token Incentives 6:20 Centralized VPNs vs Mixnets 8:00 Launch of NymVPN & Features 10:00 Payment Anonymity & UX Challenges 12:00 Node Selection & Network Performance 13:45 Ethereum Integration & Privacy Manifesto 15:00 Incubator, Funding & Final Remarks ## Transcript Welcome to East to E to E to E to E. Um, so next up, we're still going to talk about privacy. Fancy that. But a little bit of a different type of privacy in terms of a VPN. Um, so very excited for this. We've got Harry up here who's going to get himself sorted out on the laptop. You should just be able to plug it in and you're good to go. Fingers crossed. Um so after this uh we're then gonna have um a talk from Oasis, I believe. Uh and then we're going to have one other talk and then it's going to be lunchtime. Uh which we're very excited for. I hope it's going to be outside again like it was yesterday in the sun. Um yes, I heard a yes, I had a shout. Thank you very much. I did not this morning think of my mental notes of what to do to twiddle my thumbs in this situation. Last year, we had a bunch of different random activities. After this as well, I'm also going to share a little bit more information on this, but as a little bit of a tease, for those that weren't here yesterday, there's actually a private key in there, and it contains a bunch of NFTts and crypto as an art piece. So, we're gonna And the goal is not for it to be stolen and broken. Yeah. Well, you can pass some of them out, but apparently for the upcoming talk, there's a there's a little uh thing where you can get a month for free. Don't we like that? Actually, I'm not very happy with my VPN at the moment, so I'm going to have to do something about that. That's about as good as we're going to get, unfortunately. So, anyways, we're just going to start. Um, so everyone get your free subscription. We're going to walk through kind of what Nim has been doing uh over the last uh two years. So, I'm the founder. You probably maybe have run into me before, but basically I did a PhD in artificial intelligence, University of Edinburgh. And I think the main thing I realized from that is that when people think of privacy, they tend to think of cryptography, but actually the very the most valuable information is kind of who is talking to who what you call the metadata. and that and often that is unencrypted. And even if it is encrypted, these sort of patterns of communication between people reveal your social network. They reveal what you're doing, what websites you're going to, uh when your transactions are being sent on a blockchain, who's in your signal group. And there is literally no working solution uh currently today for this problem. Um and it's it affects even tour right so you can kind of look at what's coming in a tour entry node look at what's coming at tour exit node and then you can effectively deanonymize uh the tour connection and it's trivial for VPNs tour is much better than VPNs and also works against anything with a large server which is most apps so what we built and this is the first working decentralized one at NIM for the last five years or so is what we call a noise generating mixnet So how this defeats meta data attacks similar to tour there's multiple hops uh but also when you send traffic like internet packets to a hop so again this is the level of TCP IP or UDP packets generic for the whole internet we rand we delay the packets randomly and they mix together so they don't come in first in first out um and it's and then we Basically that mixing process defeats particularly when you add cover traffic, fake traffic, it kind of defeats the ability of algorithms like AI algorithms to be honest to statistically deanonymize your traffic. Now, we decided we weren't going to build a system, but because most people, including um almost all of Ethereum does not have any kind of privacy-enhanced transactions working, we build a few other components on top of the system. So, we said we want people to be able to authenticate to the system to for example prove they paid or prove they're user of some particular service. So we built an anonymous credential which in kind of in zero knowledge can prove that you've paid for the system or an authenticated user without revealing anything else. And then the second thing we had to add to the traditional mixnet is we had to figure out how can we get all these different people to run nodes. And for that uh there was a token called the NIM token which also gives you a discount on the VPN. Um and these the basically when you are effectively using the nim mixnet the nim mixnet reveals um nothing about you but you need to know which kind of nodes connect to to ship your traffic through. We have a kind of way to test those nodes to see if they're dropping traffic. You can look at the decentralized uh reliability measurements from mixnetss is the paper and effectively as you if you ship more traffic and you mix correctly through the system your reputation goes up your amount of NIM tokens goes up and if you don't if you drop traffic's traffic your your reputation goes down you don't get new NIM tokens and you can do delegated staking and all of that. So if you're interested in running a NIM node, uh talk to me uh or look at the docs. It's permissionless. Anyone can kind of spin one up. Um and so this is the uh the network in practice. You can see, you know, it's pretty visual. VPNs are big centralized data honeypotss, including all the ones people think are private. Maybe they're very nice people, but you're effectively just trusting them. You're not you can't verify anything. It's not decentralized. uh tour is decentralized which is why it's superior uh in and the vast mode of the DVPN is equivalent to tour but you can still see you can kind of figure out these timing patterns of packets while the mixet has the kind of the strongest privacy available today so what we've built now the problem is you know two years ago we came here we said hey does anyone want to build on top of NM we built a lib P2P binding with chain safe we got it working on Lighthouse. Uh, but maybe that was just too early. Uh, we haven't seen too much development and we still have all these APIs. I'll go back and visit them in a second. But what we decided is we really want to get people to actually use the application. And in order to get people to use the application, we effectively built a user-friendly app on top of it called Nimvpn. And we have these kind of different features which I'll go through in a second. But effectively you have two modes. One of which is fast and one of which is slower which is the mixet or anonymous mode. We have things that standards VPNs have like kill switches. Uh you can pay for it but again we use zero knowledge proofs to basically prevent the linkability of the payments and it works in about 10 languages with more coming. So that's the real things that we do different than other any other VPN. So again we have an anonymous mode which is slower but works perfectly well for telegram and signal and that effectively you know you just click anonymous mode button and that puts you in that mode. We also have a fast mode. So let's say you want to stream a video and our fast mode is pretty fast. It's uh about as fast as BravesVPN and it's faster than tour and that gets you you know kind of whatever you want. uh we use a little bit of censorship resistance obcation noise on that so it works in countries like Russia um and then most importantly when you pay no matter what you pay in we'll go through that in that in a second we don't connect the payment to your usage so every other VPN it's completely crazy what people do with VPNs like I want to send all of my traffic through someone else's computer and I give them my credit card information or my crypto information which you can usually figure out who you are from chain analysis and then they just hold it. So they can actually connect my address and name attached to the credit card to everything you do on the internet as long as you use that VPN. I actually would argue that is possibly more insecure and more privacy invasive than than like not using a VPN. It's completely crazy. So we have to fix that paradigm. And I I really believe that the dellinking of the payments uh from the usage even though makes the user experience harder is absolutely vital and we're not going to compromise on that. So again, we built the VPN. It works on most platforms. I would say a little bit buggy on Windows right now. Uh if we have any Windows coders in the house, please talk to me. Uh but it works perfectly well on Google and Microsoft and Froid. And if you go to nim.com, you can look at your flyer and scan that QR code. You'll go through this process because some of you have free passes. You don't have to do this, but if you want to pay, we we'd appreciate it and we'd like to look at uh you can test the user flow. So, we have different plans. Uh you know, you get discounts for a year or two years. You choose your plan and then this is the really key user experience difference. Your account is again just your private key. That's it, right? Nothing else. So, we don't have a username for you. We don't even have an email for you. Maybe at some point we should make that optional. Uh but you have a key. So, you have to kind of cut and paste that key. Uh after you make the purchase, then uh you have to select your payment type. And as you might notice uh NIM tokens and cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Monero, USDT, which is our currently most popular cryptocurrency, um you know, they they all give you a 50% discount. So even though you can say, "Oh, the VPN looks a bit expensive. It's like, I don't know, you can say it's $10 a month or 11. It's like basically five if you pay cryptocurrency. And if you buy like a two-year subscription, it's like $2, which is essentially the cheapest on the market. But then once you select your payment type, this is kind of cool. Uh you type your credit, let's say you're a normie, uh you type your credit card number in. And what we actually do on the back end is that credit card purchase is converted into an API call that does a a buy order of the token currently on Bitfinex. And so you know that kind of builds buy order pressure. Uh you can also of course pay with NIM token directly which is easier for us a little bit harder for you possibly. And then when you get the app and hopefully you're trying it out here. Uh you can it just it's first it's disconnected. It's going to ask you to put in this is kind of the user experience difficulty here. You have to put in your your private key um to log in. Then when you're logged in you can go select which mode. You can select what node you want to use. So you can see we kind of rank them. Actually Netherlands has a lot of awesome hackers in it. We have 16 people running nodes in the Netherlands and they all seem to have pretty good quality. So big shout out to Hermes Stakepool and Oceanist and whoever else is here in the Netherlands. So you can choose you can choose the exact computers use in both enter and exit the system because again unlike a centralized VPN we're decentralized network you need to choose a different entry point and a different exit point. So no no single computer knows where you're coming from and where you're going. And you know, our latency on downloads are pretty good. We've been comparing to BravesVPN. It's about the same. So, uh, a little bit little bit worse, actually, faster in in North America for some reason. And so, the VPN really works well. So, we do want you to try it. And I'm going to be here for the rest of the afternoon. So, if you have any user usability issues, I'm sure you do because we just launched this like a month or two ago, uh, do talk to me because we're we're kind of making a list and we understand that the flows still have a lot of bugs. We're working them all out and each app is a little bit different. But what I want to talk about is a little bit update about things I want to finalize with things we did two years ago. So, two years ago, we said, "Hey, why doesn't Ethereum use mixets? Wouldn't that be awesome?" and we showed you how to do it and we produced some code with chain safe. Uh and then just recently Ethereum community has noticed. So this is the make Ethereum cippher punk again kind of manifesto which is Vitalic retweeted had a more lightweight version and it's really awesome because we're seeing stuff that we've been talking about for five years like network level anonymity uh being mentioned now finally in the Ethereum community. Now, we brought this up with Ethereum Foundation like four years ago and we're ignored and you know, whatever. But it's okay. You know, we're still up for up for combined. We happy to put NIM on any wallet. Uh MetaMask, Trust Wallet, we don't care. Uh but you can get again, we're seeing that we're being mentioned as a possible wallet integration point. Now, we're too busy to integrate against wallets. There's too many of them. But we would love it if someone in the hackathon would do that. It's pretty easy. We build a JavaScript SDK, TypeScript to be technical, Rust, and we have bindings for C and Go. So probably no matter what your wallet is in, you can call the MixNet and that would be wonderful. And that the more traffic you get through the mixet, the more anonymous everyone is. So it' be great if all these people using the VPN if their traffic mixed with, for example, high value cryptocurrency transactions. And then I just want to do a quick final announcement. If you right now and you get an MVP, you get the world's most private and secure VPN, that's pretty cool. Doesn't connect your identity or your credit card address to your usage, but okay, the user experience needs some work. It doesn't maybe have quite the speed that we want it to. So, we're also going to start offering a new features that are specialized for crypto traders. For example, a free private RPC relay to be included with every NIMVPN subscription. So, that will probably be launched in a month or two. So keep your eyes open for that. And then also if you have a really cool hacking idea, this is me and CZ last month. People kind of forget with NIM even though we're weirdly not listed on Binance um that we are uh friends with CZ and we're doing we're going to be participating over the summer in a San Francisco incubator by Easy Labs which is uh the kind of investment arm formerly known as Binance Labs. So, if you have a cool idea to build on new privacy-enhanced tech, you need some money, I forget how much it is, but it's somewhere like 250 or K or so, and you don't mind Trump trying to kidnap you as you cross into the US, and you can kind of get hopefully get out. Uh, they will be doing, don't worry, next year it's going to be back in Europe, but we we'll be doing a incubator. Vitalic will be there, I'll be there, uh, CZ will be there, so we can go back in the US, which is pretty cool. And uh we would really enjoy if people applied to that incubator. We don't have enough applications yet and we really want privacy and security to be a focus of the of the incubator. So that's it. I don't know if I have time for questions, but uh you can easily grab me. That's our website. You can download the VPN and happy hacking. Give it a shot. Thanks so much. Thanks. Don't move. Don't move. Okay. if you could unh unplug your laptop, we're going to get the next person up and we can put on the slideo. Um, thanks so much for that. Uh, really cool stuff and a very noble cause and the execution seems to be coming together. So, congratulations on that. Um, if you do have any questions about this, please jump them on the slider. There's currently one. Um so the one question uh that's here right now is do the nodes get incentivized and what would you say is the risk for a node hoster to provide into yeah so so nodes are incentivized you basically get nim tokens for running nodes now of course we all know if you have a node and someone's doing something dodgy with it you may get a letter so far we've only got DMCA letters uh we recommend that you respond to those we provide legal assistance and a kind of template letter to respond to bas say look I'm running an NVPN node I don't know what's going on it's just like running a tour relay if you're uncomfortable with that level of risk you can get less token effectively by running a uh a middle node a mix node or an entry node and so while they make quite a bit less again you you don't have risk because traffic isn't exiting uh exiting your node you can also with them build service providers like custom apps which live inside the NIP network. You kind of think of them a little bit like a hidden service and there's no kind of risk with those apps. Cool. Nice on providing the template. Okay. Yeah, of course. I mean, we're learning from tour. We work with EFF. Uh we work with numerous law firms and we have a large community. So if any no one has gotten in in serious trouble yet of course it's only a matter of time but we uh you know we have a lot of lawyers and a lot of backup to make sure everyone's safe and so far you know tour for 20 years to be honest only very minor problems except one or two cases I think in Germany we recommend not hosting a node in Germany because Germany basically pushes copyright uh laws really badly. We do recommend hosting a node I don't think we have any problems in the Netherlands. You kind of got to choose a good jurisdiction uh for your node. And are there any as they're having the are there any other questions? Oh. Oh, I can't even see them. Okay. Uh why is the choice to receive a seed and not connect own wallet? We are working on connect own wallet. But again, when you get this uh the seed phrase um you're getting a address not you're getting address essentially on NIM's blockchain. So, we store the network topology and a lot of the rewarding smart contracts on our own low fee currently Cosmos. We're happy to change uh blockchain and so that's what you're getting. Is it possible to integrate VPN with hardware wallets? Yes. Uh what's it called? One of the harder wallets approached us and we do work on Ledger because Ledger works with any Cosmos token and we will be working with Safe Pal. Uh does it work behind the great firewall with advanced API techniques? Sort of. The anonymous mode does work, okay, because it's anonymous. However, the non- anonymous mode doesn't. We're working on fixing that. Give us till the summer to be fast in China. Uh, would it like to work at public Wi-Fi routers built? Yes. Uh, we would we have had multiple people uh Hans Bricks comes to mind, raw box in Ukraine building NIM into routers. We're waiting for one of them to like get it working and commercialize it. We think that will be hopefully soon. Uh yes, fast mode wireguard endpoints are hosted in the same uh network. You can run a entry node and a mix node on the same box and it's the same network. You can also choose not to run things for various uh you want to kind of control your risk. Connect to the mix on my phone. Does it work well with mobile connections? Uh we'll try the fast mode. It it's slow, right? So don't you may be connected and not know it yet. See if it works on Telegram or Signal and uh cool stuff. I agree. So anyways, uh thanks for your attention. Thanks for all the great questions and find like do not use normal VPNs. If you're if you believe in decentralization, it is [ __ ] hypocritical to then like pay some centralized guy give them your credit card number who's just going to give it to the police. We have the technology to build decentralized privacy preserving tech. We should [ __ ] use it. Like people just use mainstream garbage constantly. Please give it a shot. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. I put it there. I didn't touch it. Close it.