Nym Technologies has announced the launch of staking on the Finney public testnet. The developers believe that this will help counter the spam attacks that the network was subjected to in the past year.
The developers of the Nym project are creating a Data Mixing Network, a tool for hiding metadata at the network level. Network security is ensured by a decentralized network of nodes. According to the developer, the system provides “complete” confidentiality, allowing you to create applications that give users the assurance of the impossibility of tracking metadata.
The initial testnet, launched in April 2020, fell victim to the Sibyl Attack, a spam attack that floods the network with fake nodes. In November, during the attack, the attackers expanded the initial test network to more than 12,000 nodes overnight. Nym CTO Dave Hrycyszyn likens such spam attacks to the attack by hundreds of Smith agents on Neo in The Matrix. He offers a solution to help deal with such attacks.
“You need to make an attacker pay a certain amount in order to slow down or stop unwanted replication of malicious elements on your system,” he said.
In the case of the Finney testnet, this cost is expressed in terms of the cryptoasset for the HAL staking built on Tendermint and the Rust-based Cosmos implementation. HAL’s sole purpose is to be used exclusively for staking at Nym. During the transition to the new test network on April 15, the attackers’ hosts from the previous network were removed. Almost anyone can now deploy their own blend node.
“In the case of Nym, switching to staking on mixing nodes means that anyone can start a node,” Gritsishin said. “There is a limit to the number of available HALs that node operators can get. We are currently slowly distributing the testnet cryptoasset through our Telegram channel, so the growth of the network of nodes is slowing down due to the need to request HALs and receive them at a rate that we control. ”
Ultimately, once the main network is launched, node operators will need to buy HAL, which will impose more stringent restrictions on attackers. Nym originally set an artificial limit of 1,500 nodes on the Finney testnet, but recently removed it. Gritsishin said:
“We are seeing rapid growth. We currently have about 4,500 nodes, which is roughly 3/4 the size of the Tor network. This makes us one of the largest privacy systems in the world. ”
Gritsishin noted that the team understands the risks of opening a test network for everyone. The web is bound to attract users who come just for rewards, but don’t know a single Unix command or how to start a server. As a result, the nodes they launch are in most cases misconfigured. However, a staking system will help weed out bad nodes over the next few weeks and improve the quality of the network.
“We have not yet launched the actual blended package reward and we are currently distributing the net uptime or network presence reward,” Gritsishin said. “Later this week, when we change the reward system, lower quality nodes will leave the network.”
According to the plan of the project developers, the global network of nodes will form a mixed network Nym, which aims to irreversibly hide metadata in Internet traffic, mixing user data packets. The Nym team argues that, unlike VPN and Tor, a mixed network will help avoid even the surveillance of the US National Security Agency (NSA).
