This is “privacy for the rich” model. Unsurprisingly: poor people can’t push the token to the moon! And looking at their website it is clear they focus more on hyping the token than on actual privacy.

“Tokens will be used to reward those who put stake into the Nym ecosystem by providing services, such as operating a mixnode or validators for the Nym blockchain. Users discover service providers and attributes a service provider needs. Users may pay service providers outside of Nym directly. Alternatively, users may pay the mixnet fees directly or services may pay for or stake NYM tokens on behalf of a pool of users in order to provide services without cost to users.”

It’s fascinating how they talk down Tor (“because Tor does not add timing obfuscation or cover traffic to obscure the traffic patterns in circuits”), but fail to mention i2p which solves these issues without the need for bollockschain tokens. Makes sense — Nym seems to basically be i2p with a blockchain token bolted onto it so that it can become an investment vehicle.So either they did not know about i2p, an important and reasonably well known project which has been around for almost 20 years and is very clearly in the same problem space, or they intentionally decided not to mention it because it would make them look bad. Take your pick: are they ignorant, or disingenuous? Either is a great trait for a project that aims at protecting privacy from the NSA, no less.

" I2P (‘Invisible Internet Project’) replaces Tor’s directory authority with a distributed hash table for routing. How to design a secure and private distributed hash table is still an open research question, and I2P is open to a number of attacks that isolate, misdirect, or deanonymize users. Like Tor, I2P is based on ‘security by obscurity’, where it is assumed that no adversary can watch the entire network. While security by obscurity may have been cutting-edge at the turn of the millennium, such an approach is rapidly showing its age.Nym’s cutting-edge mixnet design guarantees network anonymity and resistance to surveillance even in the face of powerful deanonymizing attacks. Unlike I2P, Nym adds decoy traffic and timing obfuscation. Rather than a centralized directory authority or distributed hash table, Nym uses blockchain technology and economic incentives to decentralize its network.The Nym mixnet can anonymize metadata even against government agencies or private companies who can monitor network links and observe the incoming and outgoing traffic of all clients and servers." Source: https://get3xnymtech.net/docs/stable/overview/index.html. Full in depth blog post comparing it against tor, vpns , i2p and other solutions in the space https://blog.nymtech.net/vpns-tor-i2p-how-does-nym-compare-8576824617b8