Privateness protocol Nym has launched NymVPN, which it describes because the “world’s most safe VPN” and says will assist shield customers from authorities, company and AI surveillance.
The discharge comes amid an more and more hostile international surroundings for privacy-focused merchandise — one that’s seeing governments crack down on privateness tasks and demand backdoors to encryption.
The decentralized VPN, which launched on March 13, makes use of the Nym protocol’s “mixnet” to maintain customers totally nameless and guarantee no metadata will be linked to any particular consumer, in accordance with a press launch shared with Cointelegraph.
Halpin and Nym safety adviser Chelsea Manning sat down with Jonathan DeYoung, co-host of Cointelegraph’s The Agenda podcast, to debate the discharge, the significance of privateness and the way Nym plans to navigate what appears to be an more and more precarious privateness house.
How NymVPN’s mixnet works
Halpin and Manning appeared on The Agenda podcast again in December 2023 to debate what was then their upcoming VPN undertaking. Halpin defined that mixnets work by sending encrypted information throughout a number of servers whereas additionally including “a bit of faux information” to throw off whoever could also be trying to surveil the visitors, resembling a complicated AI algorithm.
“Every packet is sort of a card, and it like shuffles the pack of playing cards after which sends it to the following server and sends it to the following server,” Halpin defined.
That is in distinction with conventional centralized VPNs, the place every thing a consumer does is routed by way of the VPN supplier’s servers and the place clients should put their belief in a selected firm. Halpin mentioned:
“Should you ship your VPN information to ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Mullvad VPN, they know every thing about you. They know your IP tackle. They connect with your billing data. They know what web sites you’re going to. It’s truly type of scary.”
Creating privateness software program amid international crackdowns
A couple of months after their Agenda podcast look, Alexey Pertsev, a developer for crypto mixer Twister Money, was convicted of cash laundering prices and sentenced for his position in creating the privateness protocol — a transfer that sent shockwaves through the industry.
In keeping with Halpin, Nym is much less more likely to face the identical type of authorized hassle as a result of it’s not monetary infrastructure. “In all international locations besides a couple of repressive ones, VPNs are authorized, at the very least for now,” he mentioned. “They fall below what’s known as third-party middleman lack of legal responsibility. […] We aren’t liable, at the very least below US legislation, for delivery bits from level A to level B.”
Associated: AI makes it even easier for governments to surveil you — Nym CEO
The character of working a totally decentralized VPN that can be utilized completely anonymously means there isn’t any approach to stop anybody from utilizing it for no matter causes they need to. Manning mentioned it isn’t Nym’s position to be “the arbiter or the determiner of what’s and isn’t nefarious.” She added:
“It’s not attainable in a totally decentralized surroundings to cease them [bad actors]. Like we don’t have a approach to. If we did, I imply, we’d be centralized.”
Extra lately, numerous governments have pushed builders to implement backdoors of their encrypted merchandise. Apple withdrew its end-to-end-encrypted iCloud service from the UK market after the federal government demanded a backdoor, whereas the US Federal Bureau of Investigation lately told Forbes it desires “responsibly managed encryption,” the place “U.S. tech firms can present readable content material in response to a lawful courtroom order.”
Halpin and Manning mentioned that if a authorities have been to ever try to shut NymVPN down or arrest its builders, the Nym community is decentralized, so it ought to be capable to proceed working as normal. “In idea, we should always be capable to get run over with a automotive, and the community would preserve working,” Halpin mentioned.
Who will use NymVPN?
The Nym group was in Ukraine in 2024 to demo the VPN and current it to the Ukrainian authorities, and a consultant from the humanitarian NGO Docs With out Borders spoke on the March 13 launch event. Halpin additionally shared that the group has had conversations with folks in Syria.
The Nym group demos NymVPN in Ukraine. Supply: Nym
Nonetheless, an nameless and decentralized VPN is simply that — nameless and decentralized. This implies the group behind it has no method of figuring out who is definitely utilizing it and what they’re utilizing it for, solely that it’s getting used.
As Manning put it, “One of many issues with that query is that if individuals are utilizing the know-how, in the event that they don’t inform us that they’re utilizing the know-how, we gained’t know.”
Journal: Cypherpunk AI — Guide to uncensored, unbiased, anonymous AI in 2025
