NuCypher functions as a decentralized system for encryption, access control, and key management (KMS) designed for public blockchains. It facilitates end-to-end encrypted data sharing across public chains and decentralized storage platforms.

By employing proxy re-encryption (PRE) technology, NuCypher enables users to share private information among multiple participants within public consensus networks. The team states that this approach provides greater security and protection compared to conventional blockchain projects relying on public-key encryption.

NU serves as the native token for the NuCypher network. These tokens incentivize participants who perform key management services and handle delegation or revocation tasks. Additionally, NU is required for staking to operate a worker node. To safeguard against malicious staking, the network automatically slashes the rewards of any suspected bad actors.

Holders also use NU to engage with the NuCypher DAO, which governs smart contract upgrades and network parameters. Users who stake their NU tokens are eligible to validate proposals within the DAO.

NuCypher was co-founded by MacLane Wilkison and Mikhail Egorov, who also founded Curve. The project’s whitepaper appeared in June 2017, while the testnet did not go live until November 2018.

Egorov, a physicist and security researcher from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, previously acted as NuCypher’s CTO. Wilkison serves as the CEO and is a software engineer; before entering the blockchain space, he worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, offering financial services to technology, media, and telecommunications firms.

The pair joined the Y Combinator startup accelerator in the United States during the summer of 2016. A year later, they released the NuCypher whitepaper.

In 2018, NuCypher introduced its private testnet, which included participation from major staking infrastructure providers such as Staked.us, InfStones, Figment, and Bison Trails. The public testnet started in October 2019, followed by the incentivized public testnet in January 2020. The mainnet went live in October 2020, after $45 million in NU tokens were distributed to nodes.

While many blockchain initiatives focus on end-user applications like voting, IoT, or transaction improvements, NuCypher was built to serve other blockchains as a dedicated privacy layer. It supplies the decentralized web with privacy infrastructure through threshold cryptography techniques, including proxy re-encryption (PRE), threshold signatures (TSS), and distributed key generation (DKG).

The network allows users to grant and revoke data access for multiple parties simultaneously, offering strong security for sensitive transfers while maintaining the censorship resistance and trustless qualities of standard public blockchains. NuCypher’s cryptographic libraries consist of:

• pyUmbral, which serves as the reference implementation for the Umbral threshold proxy re-encryption scheme;
• NuBLS, a library for threshold BLS signatures; and
• rust-umbral, a Rust-based version of Umbral that includes bindings for Python and JavaScript.

When the NuCypher mainnet went live in October 2020, the total supply stood at 1 billion NU tokens. Under the established release schedule, 3,335,938 NU tokens are distributed monthly to SAFT Series 2 investors, while 4,460,000 NU tokens go to Team/Equity investors each month.

The WorkLock mechanism, a novel approach for setting up network nodes, is slated to receive 225,000,000 NU tokens in April 2021. Taking these monthly distributions into account, 1,088,876,961 NU tokens have been issued so far, with 392,750,000 currently in circulation.

According to the staking economics paper, the network’s maximum supply is approximately 3.89 billion NU tokens, with additional tokens released monthly as rewards for stakers.

NuCypher operates as a layer 2 resource allocation protocol on Ethereum, employing a proof-of-stake (PoS) system to manage its worker nodes. The network utilizes a unique node distribution method known as WorkLock. To operate a NuCypher node, at least 2,000 node operators are required to stake 353,913. The shortest duration for locking up stakes is 30 days. Nevertheless, the project does not assure that staking for more than one year yields higher reward earnings. If users do not choose to withdraw after a staking cycle, their rewards are automatically restaked for the subsequent period.

NuCypher (NU) is widely available on online platforms that handle ethereum tokens. At present, the leading exchanges for purchasing, selling, and trading NuCypher tokens include:

• Hotbit, and