Alephium x Nym #1 Buying ALPH tokens through Nym’s mixnet

Oheka
No Trust Verify
Published in
6 min readJul 10, 2023

Since the launch of Alephium’s mainnet, we have been actively supporting and contributing to the project. It holds a significant place in our hearts as it was within this remarkable community that the members of No Trust Verify initially connected. We deeply believe that the Alephium project offers a truly innovative approach to the blockchain trilemma : security — decentralization — scalability. Its real added value sets it apart and presents a new paradigm in the blockchain space.

Given their shared values and potential synergies, we’re delighted to see a collaboration between Alephium and Nym. In today’s tutorial, No Trust Verify shows you how to get ALPH while preserving your privacy thanks to NymConnect. Please note that this application only works on PCs. In the future, other integration possibilities will follow, such as the possibility of using the native Alephium wallet via NymConnect, or the ability to interact with dapps from the Alephium ecosystem through it.

What is the Alephium project?

Alephium is the first operational sharded L1 blockchain scaling and enhancing PoW & UTXO concepts. Decentralization, self-sovereignty and security meet high-performance, accessibility and energy efficiency in a dev-friendly network optimized for DeFi & smart contract applications.

  • Like Bitcoin, but more programmable & energy efficient.
  • Like Ethereum, but more secure & scalable.
  • Like Solana, but more decentralised & trustless.

Alephium is distinguished by the following technical specificities:

It scales through sharding. Alephium is built on a novel and complete sharding algorithm called BlockFlow. It improves on the UTXO model of BTC to make it scalable, and uses DAG data structure to reach consensus between different shards. This will allow up to 10’000 Transactions Per Second (currently more than 400 TPS vs Bitcoins 7 TPS).

It is programmable & secure. Alephium proposes a stateful UTXO model offering layer-1 scalability and the same level of programmability as the account model implemented on ETH, whilst being more secure. The Asset Permission System (APS) is a flexible and secure solution for managing assets on the Alephium blockchain, empowering developers to build robust and safe decentralized applications.

It is less energy consuming thanks to POLW. Proof of Less Work combines physical work and Coin economics to dynamically adjust the work required to mine new blocks. Given the same network conditions, Alephium only uses ⅛ of the energy compared to Bitcoin.

It improves on chain structure with its own custom VM (Alphred). It resolves many of the critical issues of the current dApps platforms with huge improvements on security, development experience and introductions of new paradigms such as trustless P2P smart contracts transactions.

It has its own programming language for dApps. Ralph is similar to the Rust syntax, hence its name. It allows to build efficient and secure smart contracts easier than Solidity for example.

Putting all these innovations together, Alephium delivers a highly demanded solution in the industry: a scalable blockchain improving on mature ideas from Bitcoin to deliver reliable, powerful and secure DeFi and dApps capabilities.

Tutorial: buy ALPH with privacy

At present, the ways of obtaining ALPH without KYC are : by mining or via the tradeogre exchange (ALPH is also present on other exchanges but with KYC). In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to interact with it via the mixnet using NymConnect.

What is NymConnect?

NymConnect provides a seamless, one-click interface for connecting to the Nym mixnet, with the primary objective of enhancing the confidentiality of your interactions with applications and websites. It offers robust protection by safeguarding your traffic from potential observers, including the very application or site you are using.

When you connect through NymConnect, your communications undergo a multi-layered encryption process before being transmitted through a gateway and the Nym mixnet. The mixnet employs a clever technique of blending your traffic with cover traffic and introducing micro delays. This ingenious approach effectively thwarts any attempts by observers to trace or analyze your communications, ensuring the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, it shields your IP address from being exposed.

With NymConnect, you can enjoy a heightened level of confidentiality while accessing websites and applications, empowering you to maintain control over your online privacy.

How to use it with Tradeogre ?

1st step : You need to download NymConnect via the following link :

https://nymtech.net/download-nymconnect/

2nd step : Open NymConnect, and click on the drop-down menu at the top left of the screen. Select Settings, then turn ON.

Copy & Paste the following Service Provider :

AQRRAs9oc8QWXAFBs44YhCKUny7AyLsfLy91pwmGgxuf.CWUKoKA1afSKyw5BnFJJg19UDgnaVATupsFhQpyTEBHJ@EBT8jTD8o4tKng2NXrrcrzVhJiBnKpT1bJy5CMeArt2w

3rd step : You must now configure your browser to use the proxy:

Configuration Brave/ Chrome

In order to be able to “divert” your connection on tradeogre to the mixnet you need to install an extension called Proxy SwitchOmega to configure a proxy (socks5).

First of all, install the SwitchOmega Proxy extension and go to the bar and open the installed extensions.

Click in the SwitchyOmega extension icon, then select Options.

Then click on “proxy” and add this one:

Protocol : SOCKS5 / Server : 127.0.0.1/ Port : 1080

Then click on Apply changes.

After applying changes, on Brave toolbar select the proxy your created :

Configuration Firefox

The configuration of this browser is quite simple since the proxies are native.

Go to Settings :

Then, in the general settings, scroll down to Network Settings and click on Settings.

Then you just have to fill in the fields as follows:

This will allow traffic to be redirected to the mixnet through the No Trust Verify proxy. All other traffic will still go through your own connection.

4th step : All you have to do is launch NymConnect and connect to : https://tradeogre.com/markets

On tradeogre, you can trade ALPH with the following pairs:

$ALPH — $BTC
$ALPH — $USDT

We recommend that you buy with non-KYC BTC, which you can obtain either via an ATM or from applications such as Relai or Peach.

5th step : Once purchased, all that’s left to do is secure your ALPH, on the official desktop wallet found here:

👛 https://github.com/alephium/desktop-wallet/releases/latest

Privacy loves company

Join Nym Community

Twitter // Discord // Telegram // Element

Join Alephium Community

Twitter // Discord // Telegram //

About No Trust Verify

We are members of the #VerifyValley. We support the Nym Technologies network and contribute to it since the testnet. We are happy to strengthen the mixnet with our mixnodes and our gateways.

Developer of pastenym.ch and isnymup.com

✅ Hosted in Switzerland
✅ Guaranteed commission: 5%.
✅ Bandwidth: 10 Gbit/s

Do not hesitate to contact us:

| Website | Twitter | Telegram | Linkedin | Matrix |

--

--

Oheka
No Trust Verify

Co-Founder of No Trust Verify | Bitcoin | Privacy | PoW | Cyberpunk