What promises to be the “world’s most private VPN” is out – and looking for testers
While it’s too early to say whether it will ultimately win the title of best VPN app, the service that promises to be “the world’s most private VPN” has just started public beta testing.
First introduced at last year’s Web Summit conference in Lisbon, NymVPN was developed as a solution to the problem of ISP reliability by providing a revolutionary way to protect people’s online activities. Its goal is ambitious: to give users WHERE confidentiality.
However, at the time, only the alpha version was available, meaning only those on the waiting list could try it out. Now, anyone can start testing out NymVPN’s features for free.
Rest in peace Alpha! #NymVPN@harryhalpin officially announced the public beta testing phase yesterday at @Web3summit in Berlin. Nym is now right back where the mixnet project was first announced in 2019. pic.twitter.com/4Q986c6aVdAugust 22, 2024
Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, took to the stage at the Web3 Summit in Berlin to officially kick off the beta testing on August 21 (see tweet above), giving attendees a sneak preview of the product.
“We’re proud to launch NymVPN into public beta testing at Web3 Summit, where we first brought Nym out of stealth mode in 2019,” said Harry Halpin. “We promised then that privacy technology could deliver power to the people, and now we’re showing that we can!”
A different kind of VPN
A VPN, short for virtual private network, is a security software that encrypts your internet connection and spoofs your IP address. It does this by rerouting your data through an encrypted tunnel while it is in transit via one of the VPN servers.
Leaving the technical details aside, all you need to do to use a VPN app is choose a server location and hit connect. The main difference between NymVPN and other VPNs is that here you first need to decide how you want your traffic to be routed:
- Fast mode is best suited for everyday online activities like messaging, casual browsing, and streaming. As the name suggests, it offers better connection speeds. Here, the VPN service spoofs your IP address by routing traffic through a fully decentralized network running on two-hop servers. With the super-fast WireGuard support coming soon, you can expect the performance to be even better.
- Anonymous mode is the go-to for protecting highly sensitive activity – and what really sets NymVPN apart from the competition. Not only is traffic routed through five different servers, it’s also covered in “network noise” to make it even harder for snoopers to intercept.
“With advances in AI-driven data analytics, data surveillance is becoming increasingly powerful. What is needed are advanced decentralized networks that can confound any attempts to track us, not just today but in the future,” the provider explains in a blog post.
As the image above shows, the NymVPN Mixnet approach uses several network strategies to confuse data surveillance efforts. These include data fragmentation, dummy data packets, timing delays, and data packet shuffling.
As Halpin told me when the company first launched NymVPN in Alpha in November, “AI models collect a lot of data by finding patterns in the data. Our VPN does the opposite. We add fake traffic, we mix traffic, we mix up the pattern. What we’re building is similar to a VPN in some ways, but it’s a kind of anti-AI machine.”
How to Use NymVPN Beta
The team behind NymVPN invites everyone to try out the VPN, test its capabilities, and provide feedback.
All you need to do to get started is go to nymvpn.com and enter your email address. Wait for a few minutes and check your email inbox to validate your subscription.
In the meantime, you can download the NymVPN app on your chosen device. The service offers a dedicated application for all major operating systems, namely Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and even Linux.
At this point, you should have received an anonymous credential that you can copy and paste into Add Your Credential of the NymVPN app under Settings. You’re all set to see for yourself if this really is the most private VPN out there.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational use. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and enhancing your online privacy abroad. We do not support or tolerate the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. The consumption of paid pirated content is not endorsed or approved by Future Publishing.