Building the Next Generation of Privacy Infrastructure

Transcript

one last presentation here for you today alexei from name protocol hello thank you very much hello and welcome to everyone i'm alex russell i'm the ceo of nim technologies sa and uh we're basically working on a privacy infrastructure so i'm going to start with privacy because uh what we see in terms of like uh stack that we are working on in the crypto space is that we are building on a very transparent way and we are we have conscious about our privacy but if the whole system is fully transparent you can actually uh track more things than you would than you believe so

we believe that privacy is a very strong and important point for the future people want to be private people are more free when they're private and there is a whole business model today which has been built around all the data that you let through the whole system your metadata because the data that you just expressed like your the content of your message or the what you publish as picture is a very tiny piece of the puzzle the most of the data that is useful for the company is who you talk to when and what are the patterns that you are leaving behind so and the whole business model which is called

capitalism of surveillance capitalism which has been built and based on all these data that you led through so there is a conscious about this that there is a link between your own freedom your own liberty as being able to make your own choices and the amount of privacy you have but how do you build privacy on system which are completely open right the internet that we have right now is transparent it's based on a stack which is called tcp and when you create a blockchain on top of it like bitcoin or like others you can add as much as privacy inside the network even monero one for example which is extremely private you can shuffle coins and make make it in a way that you don't see who

i am sending to but underlying the the underlying network stack where your computer is connecting to the internet to actually broadcast the transaction on a specific node this can be this can be always seen so people have to be trying to protect themselves through different uh ways so the two main ways was one is the vpns you take a vpn which can actually go through a network of malicious people and you have an exit point but you still have to trust this exit point another uh example is store which is a decentralized network which is crea is proposing onion routing and allows you to discuss with another

computer on the other side by removing the the at least the information of your ip address which is pretty good already but these two models have already have also limitation a vpn you have to actually trust the vpn company that you are um that you are using and there have been cases where they have been the data have been leaked and they could see all the uh the customers information and tor actually can be de-anonymized in a certain way the the point of tour is not to provide anonymity it's to provide some kind of obfuscation of the ip address it does that but if there is enough resources

spent on tor you can actually de-anonymize and know who is using the torque what we what we saw with tor and with vpn is that there is a demand for it and there is actually people ready to pay for for that so there's a conscience of like that privacy matters and needs to be paid for so what we've designed is a generic system based on three elements which is a nim token the mixnet which is a core engine of our system and then the credential system i'm not going to go through all of them because i only have still 11 minutes left so it's a bit short i will go

mostly on the token economics because i think this is the most interesting for this crowd a bit on the mix net because to to understand how uh how it works but the idea there is that we're going to build a system that provides privacy through a mixnet which is an engine which works in a specific way and this engine is actually run by a community of people providing infrastructure and they are organized around a token economics right [Music] so the first thing is the mixtape and the mixnet has if you if you know how tor works it is there is some comparable comparison

elements there it does some onion rooting but the the main idea without going too much into the details is that it creates a layer on top of the normal internet that we you have that we have right now it creates a layer of communication which is so there is so much noise in it there is so much distraction that if i use this network to send some data some generic data through the system there and someone to someone else who's on the other side anyone who's observing this network and trying to say who is talking to who cannot do this the network becomes unobservable and the the there is no way to link two people talking to each other

so the use case a very simple use case for us uh the first is the crypto bitcoin wallet you have a bitcoin wallet on your phone there is a bitcoin node somewhere which is being run by the the person providing the app and basically why would your network operator knows know that you have a bitcoin wallet on your phone they don't need to know this right swisscom doesn't need to know that you have a bitcoin wallet on your phone today they do know right because once you are connecting with your app there's a normal internet connect communication that goes to the to the wallet to the back end of the wallet um you can add vpn but it pushes away the the the the issue to the vpn provider so

here the idea is that inside the app we can add a small name client that will send the data through the network of nim and it will be received on the by the back end of the bitcoin uh wallet um through nim and no one can actually people can see that you're using them but people cannot see that you're talking to an actual bitcoin node you can also do the same thing with a bank and bank application you can actually transfer a real identity but the point for a bank for example is that you can protect yourself from people eyes dropping on your network and the idea is that uh only you and your customer know that you have a relationship the rest of the

world doesn't need to know right so basically in order to solve privacy we create a layer of anonymity in the middle on top of a transparent world we create this anonymity layer and then once you have an anonymous layer you can build true private communication between uh the the people all right now we create cover traffic there's time requestations lots of details that we can if you have if you have questions i can explain afterwards but now we're going to uh focus on the on the so this is the scheme a bit how it looks like the different packet i'll go here but there's a token so the whole idea of this of this network it's

a network of computers which are mixing this um these packets uh this this traffic and these computers uh if we if we look at the tor network um people are providing these servers on the on the on the network but they do it in an altruistic way it's very hard to actually be convinced that a system is good enough so you dedicate energy you dedicate servers to that system for good reason you feel good right by providing a computer to uh to tour and we think this is not sufficient so if you really want to scale in a larger infrastructure the people who are providing infrastructure should be incentivized so here this is the point of the token

is that the the system has to be paid for so the people providing the the service are getting actually a reward based on their activity on their good activities so they have to provide that they're mixing correctly all the packets and this is also a way to uh to to fight some types of attacks but they have to fight they have to provide this proof of mixing and the price of the token will actually represent a certain amount of data that can be used through the network so basically instead of paying a fixed fee of five francs for your vpn you will buy a token and it will give you a certain amount of data of credit on the network that you can use and the people on the network who

are providing this will benefit from from from this so in order to uh to to to set up this this network all the people who are working who are providing the the networks have a needs to build up their own reputation and this is where we put staking on [Music] non-blockchain type of computers so these computers are just running a mixing network they don't do any activity on the blockchain side but still we have a blockchain on the side and if we want if the person wants to actually register his computer is on the network and wants to participate in this

infrastructure providing anonymity for the users well we they have to bond their machines with some tokens and they can allow or they will look for people to actually stake with them to give them reputation so people will bet on them part of the community who has some tokens will actually bet and give value to some of the nodes who will become leaders of this of this network so what we have is we have in in our token economics we have a large community basically where all the people using the syst we have first the users of the systems are the the the the user that's have um

here we're talking about the network itself so they have the tokens and the the users of the of the network of those tokens have several things they can do so i can say first they can play with staking on some machines they can become if they want mixed node providers there is a validator set which is running a small blockchain on the side which is actually uh capturing these uh these um these tokens uh i mean like registering those those tokens and for one the ones who are interested this is a cosmos based uh blockchain we use a tendermint sdk which works very fine we were able to use the gravity bridge to represent the token on the ethereum for

example and then we have the service provider which are the ones who are going to give you the end user access to the the nim network so um the bank who wants his own people to use the app through nim and so these people will actually buy some tokens and will use them in the network to give access to their users so the final user maybe you will be using them in your phone without noticing it but the service provider who is providing a service will actually uh pay for that the same way they are paying for bandwidth or they are paying for some computer resources right now there are some also credentials

credential is the way we open the show that we have paid and i will skip on this we have this bit this this flow of uh of the whole economy in the system so you have the mixnet which is the core technology which is the design to build to provide anonymity in the network and there is a whole uh ecosystem around to uh to maintain and to give value to this network so what is interesting here is that one of the core principle is that the the anonymity the security and the anonymity is for the people who are using the mixnet so if i am a person using the mixnet to

send packets through it i receive the benefits of being an anonymous with this network but everyone who's providing the infrastructure the one who have some kind of influence are extremely transparent we can see exactly who are the operators where they are located so we are like really going into the core principle of the of the of the the crypto movement which says like the in transparency for the users or for the for the individuals and also transparency for the powerful and protection anonymity for the for the users which is the key principle here in the system um yeah so we have uh timeline so right now we are live since uh two months uh

we had a long time development phase where we had a test net for almost two years uh we are uh funded with some uh good uh partners like a16z and police and wobby kraken binance are our supporters um we did our public sale two months ago uh we're live the system the basic system of the mixnet is working the our chain is working uh people are starting to build on on top of there we have already 400 or almost 500 mixed nodes running and providing a basic level of of servers and we have already committed with all our investors

investors at development fund on top of this of 300 million dollars we are currently like expanding in terms of like the core team to uh build up the uh the continue build up the tech stack we have some uh notable figures with us like chelsea manning who is our one of our security advisor and is working with us so i can invite you to go to our website read the white paper which has been written by harry halpin and claudia diaz claudia jazz's professor in carrie leuven and they worked a lot on on this this concept of providing anonymity code source is running now this can be

used and um uh yeah uh we're basically that's it so the so my conclusion based on the main topic which was now in privacy i talked mostly about privacy how we rebuild privacy on on on on transparent system but basically the conclusion is like in order to do so in order to build this privacy and this new layer of infrastructure uh we're actually building a dao and the dao is going to run the system we ourselves are not running anything any of the code the whole system is already run by our partners we are responsible of building the code itself but the infrastructure is already not ours all right thank you very much

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