What is NymVPN? (and what makes it the most private VPN)

A guide to the world’s most private Virtual Private Network

August 7, 202410 mins Read

Make your traffic as untraceable and private as possible: this is NymVPN’s core objective. With a truly decentralized network, NymVPN aims to provide the strongest digital anonymity currently achievable. Years of work by scientists and privacy-activists have designed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that protects user privacy not as a promise, but by design.

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Most VPNs don’t protect you

Our privacy online is not protected in the same way as it is offline. What’s worse, our personal data online is being systematically exploited by many different agents. AI and machine-learning technologies are now making these threats to privacy much more severe.

VPNs have been the go-to solution for online privacy for decades. But what many may not realize is that the majority of VPNs on the market no longer adequately protect us. This is due to the way they centralize the data of our traffic, making us sitting ducks for cyber criminals, data trackers, and surveillance.

NymVPN is here to change that. With advances in cryptography and decentralized software, users can now have genuine anonymity online with the click of a button.

Want to learn more about how VPNs work and what they are used for? Check out Nym’s guide to VPN technology.

What is a VPN?

NymVPN in a nutshell

Serious online anonymity comes with a technical price: speed. In order to adequately unlink what you do online from your identity, and to protect against advancing AI data tracking efforts, decentralized networks are needed. The more servers that relay your data, the more anonymous you are, but the slower your traffic will be.

Thankfully, NymVPN offers an easy in-app choice so you can customize your own privacy needs.

When you need maximal privacy protections, simply toggle on the Nym Anonymous mode. With one click, your messages or transactions have unparalleled metadata protection, becoming extremely hard to trace. This is possible because of Nym’s novel routing through its mixnet (short for mix network) of 5 independent servers.
And for all other traffic that requires low latency, like streaming and browsing: no problem, simply toggle on the Fast mode for high speed connections through WireGuard. You will still have more anonymity than any centralized VPN can provide.

Want to finally guarantee that what you do online is truly private, anonymous, and secure? Here’s everything you need to know about how NymVPN works and what makes it so different from other VPNs available today.

Why is a VPN needed?

What’s the point of a VPN in the first place?

There is more traffic flowing over the open internet than ever before in human history. There has been major progress in ensuring strong privacy protections for digital communication. This includes end-to-end encryption has become the norm, protecting the content of messages.

But the problem is that the patterns of our communications are still visible. Surveillance watching traffic flow across the internet can easily trace who is speaking to who, from where, at what time, and from what device, etc. This can reveal a lot about us, particularly our long-term browsing habits, which can lead to knowledge about our desires and details about our personal lives.

This makes the personal data and activities of ordinary people all over the world at risk. And the micro-details of our digital lives have long become a commodity in both legal and illegal data markets.

Here are the big agents at work in tracking our every move online.

Who's tracking us, and why?


Big tech companies	Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple are the largest compilers of user data. This data is being used for marketing, product development, but also commercial exchanges with third-parties.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs)	Everything we do online passes first through ISPs that give us access to the public web. ISPs regularly keep metadata records and even sell them to third parties.
Government intelligence agencies	Government surveillance programs have unprecedented access to digital records. The potential for using this data illegitimately is extreme, and in some countries this has dire consequences for human rights.
Data brokers	These are companies that commercially traffic mass data records of internet users collected from service providers, ISPs, and other tracking means.
Advertisers	Mass data records are bought and analyzed by ad agencies to predict consumer trends and to target advertising to users on an individual and collective scale.
Web services	Every website you visit collects data about what you do through their site, whether for operational purposes, to improve user experience, or for commercial goals like selling user data to brokers.
Cyber criminals	Your data is a window into your personal world, so it is a target for malicious agents looking to rob or exploit you. Or to use your IP address or information to commit fraud.

What does NymVPN do for you?

Imagine you’re being followed. You don’t know by whom, or why. You try to speed up, to take obvious detours, but nothing seems to work: the tail is always there. When it comes to being online, there is nothing paranoiac about this feeling. As we’ve just seen, the reality is that we are being followed and tracked in everything we do.

NymVPN offers a new technological strategy: get lost in the noise of the crowd. Imagine now that you find a large gathering, like a street festival, in which everyone is dressed the same. By jumping in with them, adopting the same dress and behaviors, you’re suddenly anonymous amongst others. Finding you becomes exceedingly difficult.

Benefits of NymVPN

There are three technological pillars that make NymVPN an unparalleled privacy tool:

State-of-the-art, multi-layered encryption
A truly decentralized network
Added network noise to confuse data tracking

Let’s deepdive into how NymVPN accomplishes these three goals.

1. Encryption with NymVPN

Encryption is a crucial part of online data security. It ensures the content of your data is illegible in transit. Like other VPNs, NymVPN first encrypts your data before masking your IP address. Traditional VPN services only do this once and then route your traffic through their centralized servers.

NymVPN gives users the choice to use two distinct routing modes, each of which use distinct encrypted routing protocols:

	Hops	Encryption protocol	Network
Anonymous mode	5	Sphinx	Noise Generating Mixnet
Fast mode	2	AmneziaWG (WireGuard)	Nym dVPN

Anonymous mode: Sphinx encryption

For the Anonymous mode, Nym uses a onion-like encryption protocol called Sphinx, which is specifically designed for encrypted routing through a mixnet. Sphinx uses five layers of encryption corresponding with the five hops user traffic makes through the network. This is one of the most secure forms of data routing available. Tor’s onion encryption, by contrast, uses three layers and three hops.

Nym's Noise Generating Mixnet

Fast mode: WireGuard

The Fast mode is powered by the WireGuard protocol, which is a state-of-the-art routing program that provides extremely fast connections and encryption-decryption processes. This makes it possible for users of NymVPN to have more privacy than single-hop VPN services with comparable speeds.

WireGuard protocols

WireGuard uses state-of-the-art encryption protocols for different stages of the routing process. Here's a breakdown:

	Protocol
Handshake	Noise
Key exchange	Curve25519
Key derivation	HKDF
Encryption	ChaCha20
Authentication	Poly1305
Hashing	Blake2s
Networking	UDP

See how WireGuard compares to other major VPN routing protocols.

2. Routing with NvmVPN

Aside from encryption, the core privacy feature of a VPN is its server architecture: how many proxy relays are used to route traffic, and thus how many times your IP address is obscured?

Most VPNs on the market are single-server and thus centralized routing systems. This means they have central points of failure, for attack or surveillance, leaving the sender and destination of a message at risk.

To address this problem, NymVPN delinks sender from destination by routing traffic through either 2 or 5 independent and decentralized servers. You choose, depending on your privacy needs!

Whether you use the fast or anonymous mode, or split tunnel your traffic between them (coming soon!), your traffic will be relayed through a network of multiple independent servers (or nodes) that are run by independent operators all over the world.

Here’s how your traffic is routed differently through the two NymVPN modes.

Anonymous: 5-hop mixnet mode

With the anonymous VPN mode activated, all user traffic will be sent through 5 relay servers (nodes) on the Nym mixnet.

Before routing, your data is broken up into fixed-sized encrypted packets. These packets are then sent to the first node (called an entry gateway) which grants permission to use the network. These packets are then relayed through three successive nodes (called mixnodes) which mix your data packets up with other people’s traffic. A final exit gateway then forwards your traffic to its destination on the web where the packets are reassembled into their original form for only the recipient to decrypt and see.

In addition, the Nym mixnet deploys innovative techniques for further confounding traffic analysis: adding dummy packets (or noise and cover traffic) to the network, and introducing timing delays. All of this together makes it extremely difficult for external surveillance to track the route your data takes, and thus to link your activity back to you.

Want to deepdive into everything involved in mixnet routing? Check out Nym’s step-by-step guide here.

Fast: 2-hop WireGuard mode

While the NymVPN mixnet mode is the most anonymous routing system available, this comes at the cost of latency and speed. To provide users with highly secure but much faster protections for less sensitive traffic, the NymVPN 2-hop dVPN mode uses two decentralized servers to route your traffic.

Thanks to the power of WireGuard, encrypted connections are much faster while still providing meaningful privacy and anonymity protection. Note that the dVPN mode does not use the Nym mixnet.

3. Noise for anonymity

Note: This final principle 3 only applies to the advanced privacy features provided by the Anonymous mode.

NymVPN’s novel anonymous mode, which runs on the Nym mixnet, uses unique privacy-preserving tactics to make your traffic extremely difficult to trace by malicious agents.

Data fragmentation: When your data passes through the mixnet, it does not travel in one piece that can be intercepted as a whole. Rather, it is broken up into identically sized packets.
Traffic mixing: As your data packets pass through a mixnode that relays them, the packets are mixed up with the traffic of other users. This makes data tracking extremely difficult.
Cover traffic: To ensure that adversaries surveilling the whole network have a hard time, random “dummy packets” are regularly introduced into the network to increase the volume of data flowing through the mixnet. This provides additional “cover traffic” for real individual users, creating greater anonymity in greater numbers.

Through these network privacy-enhancing techniques, the Nym mixnet provides robust anonymity for whatever you do online that no other VPN can offer.

What is NymVPN used for?

Regardless of which NymVPN mode you choose, NymVPN is a tool for being anonymous in what we do online. This could be to:

avoid external surveillance
bypass unjust censorship laws
undermine mass data tracking efforts
access foreign-based content
or simply to enjoy private browsing

Here’s what Nym thinks the two VPN modes are particularly useful for:

Anonymous mode: ideal for protecting crypto transactions, private communications through instant messaging and email, sensitive data transfers, torrenting

Fast mode: great for private browsing, streaming, gaming, etc.

See how NymVPN compares

How to choose the best VPN for privacy

Choosing a VPN can be a confusing process. Read Nym’s guide for choosing the best VPN for your needs. But if genuine privacy and anonymity online is truly your concern, look no further than NymVPN.

And make your privacy online customizable. When you need speed but don’t want to sacrifice on privacy, NymVPN has you covered with the Fast mode. And when you need unparalleled privacy, NymVPN’s novel Anonymous Mixnet node simply can’t be beat.