NymVPN alpha testing world tour begins

The NymVPN alpha world tour is underway! Starting late February, Nym squads have held alpha testing workshops in their communities from Colombia to France and India and beyond. Now, 1:1 usability testing sessions with core community members have also begun, ensuring NymVPN v1.0 is as user-centric as possible before launch.

The NymVPN team has worked hard to gather feedback even at this early stage, starting with Nym’s return to Chaos Communication Congress in late 2023 followed by many conversations on Matrix, Discord, and ongoing email surveys. As closed alpha invites of NymVPN roll out, we’re ramping up the active feedback phase even harder.

NymVPN is powered by its community: from the enthusiasts who spread the good word of mixnets through to node operators on the Nym network and NYM token delegators keeping the network secure.

Tapping into that power, community members have started holding workshops everywhere to put the command line interface version of NymVPN alpha through its paces.

Grassroots groups of testers have formed from Brazil to Switzerland, France, central Europe, and India. Workshops are planned in Prague, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Kyiv, Ciudad de México, Puebla, Medellín, with many more locations on the horizon.

These crucial activities will battle-test NymVPN’s 5-hop mixnet mode and the 2-hop dVPN mode among people who care the most about privacy, to help guarantee NymVPN is as secure, usable and private as it can be.

With NymVPN, users gain access to complete privacy protections with the 5-hop mixnet mode, which encrypts data but also guards your metadata with traffic shuffling in the inner-three nodes of the mixnet. This is perfect for high-privacy use cases like signing crypto transactions or sending sensitive emails. Also on offer in the same application is the 2-hop dVPN mode, optimized for speedy everyday tasks like web browsing or streaming.

One challenge with creating an all-in-one privacy application is making sure the use cases between both are crystal clear.

To that end, Nym’s UX researcher, Hux, has started critical usability testing with 1:1 sessions to gauge feedback, understand user expectations, and gather data about how user-friendly the application currently is.

We’re delving deep into the design logic of the app, to understand how best to communicate the use cases of the two options. And on the technical side, community members are also helping the team test NymVPN with various operating systems, with MacOS and Linux distros, with Android to follow shortly.

With NymVPN, Nym wants to put powerful privacy protections into the hands of ordinary people for the very first time. If you haven’t already subscribed, sign up to the NymVPN waitlist now to get early access to the powerful privacy protections of the Nym mixnet.

If you care about privacy at all, testing NymVPN is a unique opportunity to contribute to the future of the private internet - one where we can all communicate free from government, corporate, and criminal surveillance.

Get in touch with Matrix and Discord if you want to join the conversation or even organize a workshop in your community. After all, privacy loves company.