NuCypher is a decentralized threshold cryptography platform that provides data privacy, access control, and other cryptographic services to decentralized applications and protocols. The network currently supports threshold proxy re-encryption and is extensible to other threshold cryptography primitives like threshold signatures (TSS), distributed key generation (DKG), Shamir’s secret sharing (SSS), and proxy re-signing (PRS).
NuCypher is a layer 2 resource allocation protocol on Ethereum that uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism to coordinate worker nodes.
NU is used for:
- Staking to run a NuCypher worker node. Proper behavior is ensured via staking, with malicious nodes subject to slashing penalties.
- Participating in the NuCypher DAO, which controls network parameters and smart contract upgrades. Users that are staking NU can validate DAO proposals.
NuCypher’s cryptographic libraries can be found on the project’s GitHub and include:
- pyUmbral, the reference implementation of the Umbral threshold proxy re-encryption scheme
- NuBLS, a threshold BLS signature library
- rust-umbral, a Rust implementation of Umbral with bindings to JavaScript and Python
