Developers, Node Runners, and Researchers Welcome Nym's Permanent Testnet "Sandbox"

December 21, 2021 at 07:42 AM EST

Permanent Testnet To Support New Feature Experimentation And Validation

NEUCHÂTEL, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / December 21, 2021 / Today, Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies launched its permanent testnet Sandbox ahead of its highly anticipated mainnet release. Developers, node runners, and researchers who want to try out the Nym mixnet architecture before joining or deploying on the mainnet can use the Sandbox testnet to onboard, test, and experiment.

The upcoming launch of the Nym mainnet is connected with several other components that the Nym development team has been preparing over the past few months. During that period, the Nym team advanced significantly in product development, recently launching the Nym Desktop Wallet for mix nodes and announcing that its mixnet explorer has been open-sourced. These new developments will be deployed across three distinct mainnet events, rolled out over the next three months.

The launch of the Nym Sandbox testnet marks a critical step before the three-step mainnet unveiling because it enables the Nym development team to release an important upgrade to "CosmWasm 1.0," the smart contract platform that powers the NYM tokenomics.

Unlike Nym's previously-released testnets, the Sandbox testnet is not incentivized. Nevertheless, Sandbox includes test-tokens and reputation designed to perfectly replicate the tokenomics of the mainnet such as reward sharing, active, standby and inactive node sets.

Sandbox will serve as Nym's permanent testnet for developers to build and integrate wallets and other apps, sending messages and transactions, and running nodes and gateways. To further streamline things, the Nym development team will also move the state of the current testnet Milhon, including its nodes, delegations, and reputation scores, to Nym Sandbox.

CTO and Co-Founder Dave Hrycyszyn notes, "the permanent testnet is an important step in the development of the entire Nym architecture. It will contain most major components and smart contracts, but in a secure test environment for us to tweak any issues before we begin the mainnet launch".

The research community is also expected to benefit from Nym Sandbox greatly. It will enable researchers to perform large-scale simulations on the privacy and security of mixnets, blockchains, wallets, and apps that run on them. "The Nym Sandbox testnet will allow researchers to experiment novel cybersecurity methods that will strengthen privacy and anonymity using distributed mix networks", says Prof. Ninoslav Marina, of Haute Ecole Arc, Neuchâtel.

Commenting on the opportunities available from the new feature-rich testnet environment, Nym Head of Research, Ania Piotrowska "early on we concluded that the benefits of our Nym Sandbox testnet environment would be a boon for research purposes. We believe it will be instrumental in helping familiarize both the crypto and non-crypto communities with our technologies, all while granting them the chance to engage with our novel privacy services in a riskless environment."

Nym's privacy-focused infrastructure obfuscates metadata and traffic patterns in data packets at the transport network layer (mixnet), helping developers protect privacy for wallets, applications and blockchains at the network layer.

About Nym

Nym Technologies SA is a Switzerland-based privacy startup that aims to offer end-to-end privacy for network and application layers. Founded in 2018, Nym is backed by investment from a consortium of industry leaders. To convey greater anonymity across a range of web-based activities, Nym offers a fully decentralized and open-source Nym mixnet, which effectively obfuscates metadata from data packets, preventing metadata surveillance.

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