Chelsea Manning, a whistleblower, shares her views on crypto in an interview with The Block. Manning is part startup Nym, which aims to use Blockchain technology to improve privacy online. Chelsea Manning believes there is a problem in crypto.
Manning claims that greed has overtaken the sector in a world where celebrities pay more than half a billion dollars for a Jpeg of a cartoon animal.
She says that this is only the Gordon Gekko-ization in the technology space, comparing the enormous interest in cryptocurrencies to Wall Street’s film character of greed.
She claims that this has led to a huge misinterpretation of crypto by critics and taken it away from its privacy-focused roots.
She says that cryptography would have prevented her entire life from being recorded. Manning was a US Army soldier at the time. In 2010, Manning used encrypted communication to reveal classified information, which was later published on WikiLeaks.
She is now a Nym privacy blockchain startup security analyst and a hardware optimization position.
Nym, a Swiss-based network that uses blockchain technology for mixing and scrambling packets of metadata (e.g. Your IP address, the person you spoke to and when and where.
Manning talks to The Block during the interview over a video conference from Brussels, where she opened the 2022 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection Conference last week with Nym CEO Harry Halpin, and Bart Preneel, a cryptographer.
Manning, despite having a strong interest in cryptography as a child, says she stayed away from cryptocurrency for most of the 2010s because she believes there is a toxic focus on speculation which has overtaken the sector’s potential to disrupt online surveillance.
Manning was attracted to the sector by blockchain’s potential to make internet safer. She says that privacy is her primary concern since the beginning of her interest in the crypto sector.
Manning views Nym as the successor of privacy tech like the Tor browser or VPNs. However, Tor has been used by both people in unstable nations to access information as well as bad actors to gain access to dark web markets such as The Silk Road. Nym claims that disincentives have been put in place to prevent such abuse by verifying and validating actors who run the nodes.
While blockchain technology is often associated to transparency rather than privacy, Nym states that it is only the mixnet nodes that are ledger-based. None of the data is stored on the ledger.
Invasion of privacy
Manning and Nym’s colleagues hope that the mixnet will be used as an infrastructure on which applications can build to create a privacy-focused Internet.
They hope to create an alternative to surveillance capitalism by doing so. Shoshana Zuboff, an academic, coined the term to describe the collection and commodification personal data online in order to make big tech companies rich.
Jaya Brekke, Nym’s chief strategy officer, says that once you share anything personal on social media it is automatically gathered without your knowledge and used in algorithms not only to target you but also other people.
Manning says that a private internet is crucial for marginalized communities. Manning notes that trans and queer communities are becoming more visible in recent years. However, harassment has increased and people have been forced into anonymous roles.
Manning says, “I believe that private technology is essential for the safety of our community. It’s literally the best thing for every person in the world to have access to these technologies.
Manning disagreed that online privacy has become so commonplace that data protection is not a priority for the average user. As an example, Manning cites Signal, an encrypted messaging system, as an example of an everyday user prioritizing privacy. “I believe that people care. She says they have given up because there is no other option.
It seems that everyone in venture capitalists believes she is right.
The Nym project was funded by outside investors, including Polychain Capital and the a16z developer fund of $300 million. Nym was led by a16z in November last year.
She says, “What I find most interesting about the fact there is VC backing this project is the fact that other projects that are purely non-profit don’t have as much investment or funding as we do.”
Manning acknowledges, however that most of the popular crypto projects are centralized entities that are focused on privacy and financial gain. These are the blockchain projects that VCs have lavished the most billions of dollars onto so far, and not Nym-based utility-based projects.
She understands this is why people are skeptical about her involvement with blockchain technology.
She hopes that she can alter perceptions of blockchain and crypto technology and change the perception. She says, “I want to change the culture away from crypto being only associated with cryptocurrency.”
First, Nym must be developed from a fledgling privacy startup to a viable technology that users can use every day without needing to know the technologies behind it.
Manning said that she will also include a section of Manning’s personal history in a forthcoming memoir.
She says, “I want be an evangelist to go back to the cyberpunk root of crypto.” “This is about cryptographic technology that actually assists people in their communications, privacy, and their ability to protect their identities.”
