Privacy-focused startup Nym Technologies has developed the first block for its Nym mainnet and has started onboarding validators ahead of its mainnet launch.
In a press release shared with CryptoPotato on Wednesday, Nym noted that it has welcomed some top firms as its network validators, including the telecommunications giant Swisscom, Dokia Capital, Chorus One, Nodes.Guru and a few others from the community like Commodum.
The validators will help maintain Nym’s mixnet privacy system, which can allegedly defeat nation-state-level mass surveillance.
They do this by providing consensus on the network arrangement of mix-nodes at any time, a public history of all NYM token transactions, in addition to creating and protecting certificates against double-spending, including anonymous Coconut credentials, used to access the mixnet.
Speaking on the development as a Nym validator, Dominic Vincenz, Fintech Innovation Manager at Swisscom, said:
“Nym has built a powerful global privacy network that is both decentralized and incentivized and we are thrilled to partner with Nym and support the development of privacy-enhanced infrastructure and foster new data-ownership centered business models. We are convinced that data privacy is one of the most important factors for decentralized open networks to succeed.”
Nym also revealed that its development team has enabled smart contract uploads to its Cosmos-based blockchain, dubbed Nyx, a general-purpose smart contract blockchain.
Per the announcement, Nyx is expected to provide users with cost-effective and near-instant transactions, with a smart contract order execution speed of up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Nyx’s multi-use-case design combined with Cosmos’ Web Assembly-based smart contract environment, CosmWasm, and Nym’s powerful set of validators will enable it to meet the high computational requirements of the platform.
Dave Hrycyszyn, CTO at Nym Technologies commented on the launch, saying:
“We are pleased that our technical and partnership decisions over the past year are paying off and that in addition to our privacy mixnet, we can now offer a powerful general-purpose smart contract blockchain! This is a step in the direction to allow us to extend Coconut functionality, meaning application layer privacy, to an entire developer ecosystem.“
The launch of the much anticipated Nym mainnet will mark the beginning of its incentivised global privacy mixnet, the mixnet token NYM will allow people to access mixnet, run mix nodes in the network, and get rewarded.
Earlier in November, the firm announced that it had raised $13 million in a third investment round led by a16z.