Nym | Ade Molajo - Unleashing the Power of the Internet│ETHDam 2024

[Music] we kick off our afternoon uh session uh starting off with ad from Nim talking about enabling privacy thank you very much thank you it's good to be here for your first post lunch talk um I won't be too long because I know you're probably all tired from um from that delicious um chicken but let's um let's dive in so I'm going to be talking about how to how to protect your online privacy from a TCP IP level I know up until now we've heard a lot about how to protect your privacy on a web 3 level but let's look at what's happening in web 2 so the agenda thank you please take a seat sir the agenda for today will be public Wi-Fi dangers we'll look at at activity tracking and how your activity is being harvested by just a few big tech companies today we'll look at the lack of user control that we all have and then we'll look at Nim VPN we'll take a look under the hood how to protect your data how to take control of your privacy and finally what you can do to spread the word so first of all show of hands how many people have been to an airport a train station or even a coffee shop in the last 24 hours actually let's say 48 hours and you've connected to public Wi-Fi yeah that's uh that's like 60% of us and I know you're all very careful you all probably use some version of a VPN or tour or something but think about think about your parents think about your grandparents um think about um even your partners they probably don't know about the dangers of public Wi-Fi and figures show that 40% of them will be hacked at least once a year that's a stark figure also think about this like I said at the start just a few big tech companies actually control your internet data that's why you probably didn't use Expedia to book your travel tickets but as soon as you landed in in skiple airport you started to get um notifications about U you know here's the here's the latest thing that's happening in the city here's how to get a bus and that's not by accident it's because your IP address has actually been sold to them or your geolocation has been sold to them that's how they know where you are today something else to think about in the web 3 space they don't have to have your your wallet address to Target you for me attacks uh your IP address is just as useful for anyone who's trying to do something malicious uh you know using your identity and there till today there have been a few solutions that that are being um that are being propagated to try and reduce these risks and we'll look at a few of them and what their shortcomings are so if you were here a few hours ago my colleague would have already told you that endtoend encryption it doesn't work right now vpns well centralized vpns all they do is shift the trust from one hop to another that doesn't work and finally tour has had its issues and we'll look at what those are and what our ultimate solution is so like I mentioned with tour you know first of all it was adopted by people who were trying to maybe buy illegal drugs maybe buy firearms online but very quickly since 2020 actually it became adopted by uh just people who were trying to protect their online activity tour does have its limitations because it merely masks your IP address but when it comes to your geolocation when it comes to trying to stop Hackers from doing packet analysis to trace the information back to you toour is not very good for that and then we probably all use signal again this has been sold to you as a secure way to to message um to message other users but again this has its shortcomings um one shortcoming that that to and signal both share is their fragile funding model tour is run by volunteers so if they want to turn their nodes off there's nothing really stopping them from doing so there's no incentive to keep their nodes online and with signal yes they got a sizable donation from their CEO but how long is that donation going to last how long is your privacy going to be secured I haven't actually introduced myself so I'm ad I'm head of BD for Nim a few years ago I did a master's of science at it in it law and management in Kings College London and as part of that I studied forensics I studied machine learning and that made me realize that we are not just in a surveillance state but this is actually a surveillance world and since then I've been dedicated to using web 3 to help solve the issues that web 2 is powerless to solve on its own so the solution that I've been alluding to is called Nim VPN and we're going to take a look under the hood to see what makes it different to any other VPN that you've used in the past all right so first of all it's decentralized this means even if we wanted to we couldn't Snoop on your activity we have no idea what's moving through our VPN what's moving through our mixet I'll explain what a mix net is in a minute but we have no way of logging your data because we don't actually control the flow of your data so it's cross fun it's crossplatform compatible meaning whether you're on a on a Microsoft um machine whether you're on a Mac whether you use iOS maybe you use Android you can use the VPN and because it's its interface is like any other interface you you've used before when it comes to VPN as Steve Jobs would have said you already know how to use it also because we have zero knowledge credentials no one can link your payment back to you I think this is an amazing feature of the VPN um our researchers can tell you a lot more about how this works and um what what Leaps and Bounds that they've had to go through to get this working but as I promised you we're going to take a look under the hood of the VPN so n VPN is powered by something called a mixet if you imagine this is you over here and you're trying to access your favorite um app or service you know this could be this could be a web 3 service it could be a web two service um let's go with um your bank for instance let's say you're trying to access in because we're in Amsterdam so you log on to your bank and before you can access your banking information your computer generates internet internet packets which have to flow through the network to get to the servers of your Bank you can see here the packets are generated all different sizes which can be deciphered by anyone who has the knowhow to figure out what's actually happening but the packets then move into the Mix net they hit the Gateway node where we do a number of things we strip the packets of their IP address we strip them of their geolocation and in so doing change the the unique signatures of the as you can see here they're all different sizes but then as soon as they hit the Mix net they move and they become all the same size in addition to this each packet flows through a unique route making it difficult to track them or to trace them back to the origin they then flow through five hops of encryption where we add cover packets on top of them these cover packets mean that even if there's just a few people using the Mix net it's still very difficult for anyone who's trying to Snoop you know anyone who's trying to do packet analysis to to trace the packets back to the source of origin so they go through five hops Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam and then they hit your app or service fully secured fully anonymized from the place of origin this does put a degree of lag on your internet traffic though which is why we have something called a two hop solution so with Nim's VPN you can either opt to use the five hop solution or we have a two hop solution which makes it faster but still giving you an advanced degree of privacy when you're using your favorite app or service now we can compare this to T as you can see with t your packets just flow through one route in through their onion rooting Network and out on the other side which means anyone who has the knowhow can still study these packets they can place a listener here and a listener here and still figure out where these packets are originating from so in a sense you might as well not be using to at all and as I said at the beginning with VPN it's just one hop all you're doing is Shifting the trust from one place to the other making it extremely easy to still Trace back your internet packets to where they began also one thing to note is that Nim's mix Nets are incentivized every node operator is paid for the work that they're actually doing as they root your packets through the Mix net this means that they're incentivized to keep their nodes up and running unlike T which is run by volunteers and at any one time they can choose to switch off their nodes because there's no real reason for them to keep them up and running okay so we're going to take a look at the tokenomics of the Mix net as a user you pay to use Nim VPN using Nim tokens this doesn't mean you have to exchange your tokens for Nim and then gain access to the to Nim VPN you can use any token that you want you can even use a credit card and this payment is then is then exchanged to Nim in order to pay the mix the mixnet node operators in addition the these mixnet node operators are kept in check using Nim's blockchain which is called NYX so NYX has a set of validators who look at the work that the mixnet nodes are doing and they make sure that they're being paid fairly they also make sure that there's nothing there's no funny business going on with the mixnet nodes lastly if you're a service provider for example we currently have a partnership which is um in progress with zcash where they've agreed to just dump a 100,000 Nim tokens in a pot this will give their users access to the mixet without them actually having to pay for it for themselves and this should last their users for about a year so moving forward what can you do to protect yourself the obvious answer is download Nim VPN this will be available in a few days and you can sign up to the alpha release and start to use it you'll have free access to it for a few months if you like it of course become a paying user we would love that also take control of your online privacy I'm sure all of you are aware of how to take control of your web 3 privacy but it's time to also take control of your web 2 privacy because they go handy in hand as our CEO once said it's not enough to use a zero knowledge protocol because you might have web 3 privacy but if you don't have web 2 privacy it's like turning up for work in a in a shirt and tie and not having any trousers on also spread the word it's not enough for just you to protect your internet privacy explain to your friends explain to your family because if they are vulnerability then you aren't safe either so of course all app developers here um we would love to talk to you there's a lot that we can do together there's you know there's Leaps and Bounds that still need to be crossed there's so many Integrations that can come about thanks to the mixet even thanks to Nim VPN and to users I've already said your right of access is the n token but you don't actually have to own this token download the VPN try it out if you like it become a paid a paying user use your credit card which is authenticated using a zero zero knowledge proof meaning no one can trace you back I know that is a bug bear of a lot of web 3 users you don't want to use your credit card because of kyc blah blah blah but thanks to our Z our zero knowledge proof payment no one can trace your payment back to you you which means you have endtoend privacy when you're using Nims VPN again uh that's me and Shameless plug if you want to follow me on socials you can do so now thank you does every anybody have any questions yes could you maybe go a little bit deeper on the economics of the VPN nodes um because I know right now people doing it voluntarily and it seems like you want to create like economics around that but what would be a fair price to pay to use Nim and what would be a fair price uh for a node operator they would get for running a node yes so right now Nim VPN will be um the the charge will match the charge for any normal VPN that you use today so if you think about how much you pay to use nordvpn that's how much it will cost to use Nim VPN and it will be charged on a per gigabit transferred rate and oper what can they expect in terms of Revenue the node operator um maybe one of my colleagues will be able to help me out with that hey um I'm from n I'm sing I was here earlier today I actually I'm a devil who connects to The Operators I don't have the exact numbers because I don't want to give like Financial advices on things we still getting to figure out maybe you do but we are here all team um no I'm gonna speak don't worry about that welcome to Amsterdam uh so how it's how it's done you run a note you need something which you called stake saturation um in order to if you have 100% stake saturation you're going to be getting a full reward a saturation is quite high it's calculated that we have a Target stake Target which is a 40% of our circulating Supply we expect to be staked from that percentage from this number we divide it on all existing nodes and a system and that gives us a number which is a stake saturation that means we don't expect any one user to have a fully saturated note bys so then that incentivize another toen holders who don't want to run their nodes but want to have some APR to stake on top of your note which is a delegation and based on that you lifting yourself higher closer to you get to the stake saturation point you are having higher chance of getting into the active set and higher rewards there is a well protection as well because once you get over 100% you're not getting higher in fact you start to get lower of a of a because basically dividing yourself among more than 100% right um then how the ratio is is um we also every 15 minutes pinging through the entire network seeing what is your um routing score so the higher you get the better we aiming for people having 100% of a rooting score 100% of response and the algorithm there is the performance on a power of 20 times stake saturation and this number if you get it from each note each 15 minutes it's going to give you the possibility on like how you're going to get into into the active set and then from the mix mining pool which is a pool which is getting money from uh it's getting nimes from our treasury as well as from VPN users um you allocate through the smart contract in the end of every Epoch which is Once In 60 Minutes across all active nodes right now it's 240 nodes which are active per hour and those get each hour chosen by this algorithm I just name and also each hour they get shift you cannot never have the same layer which you had an hour before so you cannot like predict your position and try to start to like you know be doing a bit of like shady business even though you don't see any payload obviously because you just see the encryption from the node before and to the note after but to even prevent that if somebody would hold a lot of notes we shift them in a way that they cannot tell themselves which their note in which layer their note is going to be in an hour but if you want to give an exact figures yeah I just want to give an exact figure so it's like now it's like 15 16% apy so it's kind of comp comparable with other node operator services on your Nim stake if you're taking a node without operating one I do believe if you're operating one it's a bit different but bear in mind that this is experimental technology decentralized physical infrastructure incentivized token economic stuff so we there's there's with the VPN coming into the picture the entire you know token flow is going to have a massive change because there's going to be an influx of of Fiat cach into the system so we do there's it's going to get sort of it's an iterative process of finding the right parameters and right now what we're doing for example in this just to be super transparent for future node operators maybe in the audience here that we're doing an operator research figuring out the operator needs and kind of what they expect how the rewards should work after the VPN is online so we kind of find toing token economic as we go to make sure that it's really if you operate a super high quality node and you convince enough people to trust that you're operating a super high quality node by you know getting stake on your node then you should get really rewarded for your services because you're going to be funneling real life traffic through the you know a mix net so it's kind of yeah add something too yes one thing to it as an operator you set your profit margin then the market decides am I I'm a name name token holder while you put your profit margin wait too high I'm like why would I stake on you right when somebody has a lower but it seem that maybe you have higher quality notes and I know because performance is on a power of 20 and your are 100% up time well then maybe I'm going to rather stay on yours even though you take a little bit more of money because you got better machines we also have people who are especially in Latin America who are outspoken activist and they get proof by the web pages of different projects that their revenue goes to those projects so they running it as like a doos and stuff and they would have higher profit margin but people stake on them because they know that the reward goes into some public goods so there is also this incentive so Bic it's like a mini market economy of of node operators and it's still in its infancy so we welcome innovative business ideas how to run better nodes together with what proposition maybe you know so it's still really much up to everyone to figure out how how to make thanks can you say anything on the geographical distribution of the current active set yes me of can go there's I can open the weite yeah sorry sorry if if we open a a website link the uh graph graph website that should give us a good location of the VPS is or the Explorer okay open explorer. n.net but it's it's fairly well distributed so we have I think like 64 70 country B like nation state based country coverage in a way uh and one of the reasons for doing the operator research and to find tuning to economics and to figuring out you know how we make it better because once the VPN launches it's not going to be just a few proof of concept apps sending you know one sort of like small data but it's going to be massive amounts of users sending a ton of data across the mixnet which is already doing performance testing every week now so if you're a not operator you can sign up and be push it to the Limit basically see what you know where it breaks so it's kind of really interesting in this sense I think what what's happening it's it's no there's a there's a connection issue oh here we go yeah here's the map yeah it's going to be updated soon one country thanks very much that's what we've got time for um uh that was really good thank you so much that really thank you very much [Music]