At Blockchain-Based Privacy Infrastructure Startup Nym, Chelsea Manning Says Cry...

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"I do want to shift the culture away from crypto being associated only with cryptocurrency," Chelsea Manning recently told a digital assets news site named the Block.

In a world where celebrities are coughing up more than half a million dollars for a jpeg of a cartoon ape, Manning says that the sector has "unequivocally" been overrun by greed... She says this has resulted in a huge misunderstanding of crypto by critics, drawing it away from its privacy-focused roots.

"Without cryptography, my entire life history wouldn't have been able to take place," she says. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, used encrypted communication services to disclose classified information to Julian Assange, which was later posted on WikiLeaks.

Now, she's a part of privacy blockchain startup Nym as both a security analyst and serving in a hardware optimization role. The Switzerland-based Nym is a decentralized network that uses blockchain technology to mix and scramble packets of metadata — e.g. your IP address, who you talk to, and when and where.... Manning sees Nym as the successor to privacy tech such as the Tor browser and VPNs.

Tor, however, has been used both as a way for people in unstable countries to access information and by bad actors looking to access dark web marketplaces such as The Silk Road. Nym says that there are disincentives put in place to stop such abuse via the validation and verification of actors running the nodes on the network. And while blockchain technology is often associated with transparency as opposed to privacy, Nym says it is only the nodes of the so-called mixnet that are ledger-based — and none of the data itself is stored on the ledger. Manning and her colleagues at Nym hope that its mixnet can act as the infrastructure upon which applications can be built to create a privacy-focused internet.

By doing this, they hope to foster an alternative to surveillance capitalism — a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff to describe the tracking and commodification of personal data shared online for profit by big tech.