NymVPN alpha is ready for private launch in February

This is your last chance to join the NymVPN alpha community, with early access to the unparalleled privacy protections of the mixnet.

Author: Nym

January 28, 20244 mins read

This is your last chance to join the NymVPN alpha community, with early access to the unparalleled privacy protections of the mixnet — across the whole internet.

The time for actual private access to the internet is fast approaching. NymVPN is set to roll out in a private alpha release, after a successful 2023 culminating in the first live CLI demo of the NymVPN at Chaos Communication Congress. In the coming weeks, NymVPN will be available to a closed group of alpha testers.

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Nym CEO Harry Halpin, Chelsea Manning, Chief Scientist Claudia Diaz and Head of Product Marc Debizet on the NymVPN

Read on to find out more about the features that will launch first and what’s lined up next for this first commercial app to run on the Nym mixnet.

NymVPN alpha — private release

Over the past few months, more than 30,000 individuals have been invited to sign up as alpha testers and get early access to NymVPN and its unique two-pronged approach to privacy: combining a dVPN with mixnet technology.

This group of people will get private access to the powerful protections of the Nym mixnet, join discussions on the private NymVPN alpha channel, and be invited to exclusive Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions with Head of Product Marc Debizet and Nym CTO Mark Sinclair.

The NymVPN alpha will launch starting with Linux and macOS, featuring both a secure 2-hop dVPN mode and an advanced 5-hop mixnet mode (including Sphinx encryption, multiple routes, individual keys per packet), with a wide choice of entry and exit hops in multiple locations. Windows, iOS and Android will follow shortly after.

This is just the beginning. Censorship-resistance, split tunneling and a killswitch are the next R&D priorities to be rolled out over the course of 2024. The initial public release will feature a subscription model, enabled via zk-nym zero-knowledge credentials — ensuring people can fairly pay for services without compromising their personal data and payment details.

What is NymVPN?

NymVPN runs on a decentralized network. Decentralization enables strong privacy properties making it near-impossible to trace your traffic through the internet. But NymVPN is not just a dVPN, it also features mixnet technology: a novel feature ensuring unlinkability and strong privacy protections of not just the content of your messages but also your metadata.

The Nym mixnet in action via NymVPN’s 5-hop mixnet mode

Mixnets are a unique privacy technology that have only now, after years of research, become available to ordinary people. By shuffling your traffic through a stratified network of nodes and shuffling the order of packets, your patterns of communication vanish and become untraceable to unwanted observers. NymVPN is the first user-friendly application built on the Nym network. As plug-and-play privacy-as-a-service infrastructure across the transport layer of the internet, the mixnet will in time be folded into browsers, search engines, and blockchains across the Web3 ecosystem. Read more about mixnets here.

Combining the best of both worlds, NymVPN has two distinct modes in one simple application:

The NymVPN 2-hop dVPN mode:

Optimized for speed;
Customisable entry and exit nodes for geo-blocking resistance;
IP address obfuscation for everyday browsing, streaming, or gaming;
Multi-hop by default, going far beyond the privacy standards of most VPNs.

And

The NymVPN 5-hop mixnet mode:

Optimized for privacy;
Complete privacy against even government-level adversaries for sensitive use cases like crypto transactions and secure email that are not timing sensitive;
No more metadata leakage of timing and volume of packets;
Traffic analysis resistance via packet shuffling and dummy traffic in inner-three mix nodes.

Nym is trustless, permissionless, and totally transparent. Unlike traditional VPNs where you have to trust that the provider isn’t spying on your communications, Nym’s full stack is decentralized and open source with gateways and mix nodes dispersed all around the world.

As Nym CEO and cofounder Harry Halpin said in his new year note, if 2023 was about readying the Nym network for usage, 2024 is the year everyone everywhere will be able to enjoy truly private access to the internet.