Nimiq (NIM): A Blockchain For Your Browser

Tooling for interactions between web2 and web3 is a real topic. Blockchains are complicated beasts and they’re hard to tame when it comes to plug them to a website for example. At the moment, paying in crypto or integrating a crypto payment mechanism to your website can be complicated and scare people who want simplicity. Well, Nimiq is here.

1. What is Nimiq?

Nimiq(NIM) is a crypto payment system for your web browser. How is it different from other blockchain called by web interfaces to secure transactions? Well, I think I can summarize it with one picture from their whitepaper:

Nimiq is browser-first. After years of dealing with online transaction issues on the Ethereum blockchain, this makes a lot of sense to me.

A consequence of this design is that Nimiq is easy to use for Javascript developers:

The documentation is great with a couple of snippets ready to integrate. If you know a tiny bit of Javascript, you can embed a client and connect to the network.

It’s as simple as this:

<script src="https://cdn.nimiq.com/latest/nimiq.js"></script>
<script>
    Nimiq.load().then(async function() {

        // Configure for Testnet. For Mainnet, use main().
        Nimiq.GenesisConfig.test();

        // Instantiate a config builder.
        const configBuilder = Nimiq.Client.Configuration.builder();

        // Create a client based on your configuration,
        // it will automatically connect to the network.
        const client = configBuilder.instantiateClient();
    });
</script>

But that’s not all.

Nimiq is also increasing crypto-security through a wallet and provide the option of using a Login File that contains a password-encrypted version of the private key of an Account. This is formatted as a QR code and presented as an image file for the user to download and backup. This method allows users to easily store their private keys while still being able to use the 24-word representation as a secondary recovery method.

2. What are the use cases?

There are plenty of use cases on their website, I want to detail some of them so you understand the magic.

For example, you can create a website selling video games against their token NIM:

Or even build an entire goodies shop with a module:

Even more interesting, this is a website for any payments using a custom link/QR code:

3. Nimiq as an investment

The NIM price goes through a lot of booms and bursts. However the volumes always reach a resistance:

The market capitalization is sitting at 33 million USD:

And it’s an interesting moment to get in as the crypto market starts to take off again.

4. Conclusion

I like the project because it brings simplicity and security to the space. From the website to the library everything is screaming “SIMPLE”. You know what happens to simple products? They get used. I will be investing in Nimiq because I like the philosophy and the fact that you can build things faster than anywhere else. Also, the price, the market capitalization and the seasonality (boom/burst) makes me think it’s not a bad timing to allocate a part of my portfolio to the project (along with Stratos).

Thanks for reading.

Disclaimer: this is not financial advice