# How to stop your wallet from collecting your personal data: Enabling the Nym Mixnet with Metamask

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 21:35
- Topics: Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-IrDVRhrfYT8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrDVRhrfYT8

## Description

Speaker: Harry Halpin
CEO
https://nymtech.net
https://twitter.com/harryhalpin

Recently, there has been various privacy scandals about how wallets, such as Metamask, and the very RPC nodes used to access Ethereum, such as Infura, are collecting personal data such as IP addresses. This personal data can be used to de-anonymize Ethereum addresses and link transactions to real-world identities. In this presentation, we show how to use the Nym mixnet today to block even Infura from gathering the IP address, as well as the exact time and nature, of your transaction. We show how to enable the Nym mixnet inside of Metamask and how it compares to other less privacy-preserving options such as VPNs, Tor, and HOPR, none of which can defend against a powerful adversary with a 'God's eye' view of the entire Ethereum network. As a bonus, we will show how Ethereum 2.0 validators can deploy the Nym mixnet to make sure they do not suffer from a DDoS attack in the new Ethereum consensus algorithm.

Harry Halpin
CEO
https://nymtech.net
Harry Halpin is the co-founder and CEO of Nym Technologies, a blockchain startup building the next generation of cross-chain privacy infrastructure. The Nym mixnet is the only real-world mixnet that currently provides protection against an adversary that controls an entire network, and currently works on Ethereum, Cosmos, and Bitcoin - as well as generic internet traffic. Before founding Nym, he was a research scientist at MIT designing cryptography APIs under Tim Berners-Lee and received a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of Edinburgh.

https://twitter.com/harryhalpin