Nym, a developer of a decentralized privacy infrastructure, has raised USD 13m in a Series A funding round, as the startup prepares to launch its mainnet in the coming months.
The funding round was led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and joined by a number of other high-profile investors, including Digital Currency Group, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, and others, as well as some individual node operators on the network. The latest round followed a USD 2.5m seed investment in 2019 led by Binance Labs, and a USD 6.5m round in July this year led by Polychain Capital.
Speaking with Cryptonews.com during the Blockchain Economy Expo 2021 conference in Dubai this week, Nym’s CEO, Harry Halpin, said that the startup is now focused on launching its mainnet, which is estimated to happen “by the end of the year or early next year.”
“Once we actually hit mainnet, we’re gonna see a lot of adoption pretty rapidly,” the CEO said.
According to him, the company’s testnet has managed to reach 10,000 nodes, which he said is “almost as big as even Bitcoin.” (The Bitcoin (BTC) network now has almost 13,500 nodes, per bitnodes.io data).
Nym provides network-level privacy that works “sort of like a super VPN that is resistant even against the nation-state-level adversaries,” per Halpin. Meanwhile, unlike many other projects that have launched their own tokens, Nym is not aiming for its token – NYM – to be used for payments or any other functions outside of its own network. The company instead supports the use of BTC for payments.
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Watch the full interview, where Harry Halpin discusses Nym’s business model, their partnerships, further capital raise plans, privacy-related trends, how the startup solves its challenges, and why Facebook‘s metaverse is “a giant scam.”
The interview is brought to you by Matt Zahab and Eimantas Žemaitis.
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