NYC Privacy Meetup - Pubkey May 1, 2025
Event Date: May 1, 2025
Location: 85 Washington Place, Manhattan, NYC
Overview
On May 1st, 2025, there was a privacy pop up event held at Pubkey in New York City. The organizers of this event had previously held a pop-up a few months back. They were coordinating another meetup, but this time they had access to the attic (back room). This allowed for presentations. I reached out to the organizer and said I’d like to present on Nym. Im loosely connected to the LunarDAO community and help run gateway infrastructure for the Nym network. I thought this would be a perfect time and place to present as NymVPN had just recently launched.
Event Highlights
The event was sponsored by Cake Wallet and also included a presentation by one of their team members. They covered food and drinks. There was a turnout of ~20-30 people which is more than we were expecting, especially for a Thursday night. The event went from 7-10 pm. Presentations began at 8 pm. After presentations finished, everyone moved to the bar and continued chatting and discussing ways to collaborate, including using the tools discussed at the event. The bar is known for its support of Bitcoin, so I made sure to highlight NymVPN’s mixnet functionality and btcpayserver acceptance of BTC and Lightning. Nym swag/stickers were available for all that visited.
Speaker Presentations
Ashigaru
Cake Wallet
Bisq/Robosats
XMR Bazaar
OrangeFren
NymVPN
I presented on Nym and the topics I covered were:
- What is a mixnet
- How Nym differs from VPNs and overlay networks
- Nym’s architecture - Gateways and Mix Nodes
- Private payments for NymVPN
- How to get access to NymVPN
The presentation was about 15 minutes and I covered generalities around Nym for people who’ve never had exposure to mixnets.
- Ive attached some slides from the presentation I gave. If you’d like the entire presentation, message me and I can send you the entire presentation from the event.
Impacts and Outcomes
- The crowd were relatively technical with close to 90% knowing what VPNs are and ~40% having used Tor or VPNs
- After the presentation I was able to show some of the audience NymVPN in action. This included both wireguard mode and anonymous mode using various apps in the different modes.
- The general sense of the crowd was a positive interaction from my talk. A few were keen on looking over the docs as they wanted to understand the technicals of the mixnet. They wanted to understand how Nym’s “can’t log design” worked under the hood.
