It’s one of the VPN products I saw on fdroid, but I couldn’t find payment info and it says it’s experimental. Has anyone tried it and have a baseline on how it is compared to other VPNs?
Also do they have payment methods? I couldn’t find them last time I looked and I’m worried it’s a free VPN
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I inquired here previously, and I am keeping an eye on the development. Reading up on NymVPN, it sounds like it could kill a couple birds with one stone, as it were. I’m generally not an early adopter, so it’s a waiting game for me.
Yes, I tried it when it was in beta but it is now officially launched (so shouldn’t be experimental anymore). The main difference with traditionnal VPNs is that it rely on the nym mixnet which is a decentralized network that is routing packets and noise packets of the exact same size and mixing them through relay nodes. Basically it’s a new gen Tor network (without hidden services).
The app let you access the full mixnet in Anonymity mode which is 5 hops and thus extremely slow but suitable for messaging, e-mail, etc… But it has heavy battery use on mobile, at least when I tried it. That’s because it has to constently send fake packets for noise. It also let you use Fast mode which reduce the hops to two and thus is less private than Anonymity. However NYM, the company is not running any nodes, these are community runned unlike most VPN companies. Which is making Fast mode actually more private than a single hop VPN such as NordVPN.
Another interesting thing they did for registration is generating a Zero-Knowledge proof of payment that is untied to your payment informations. And thus does not require an account to register similar to IVPN and MullvadVPN.
These are the payment methods supported:
- Credit Card
- Crypto (including Monero)
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- Cash
- Nym token
They are building a decentralized infrastructure with a tokenomics incentive for good behavior from nodes. They have their own blockchain on COSMOS and it is untied to the mixnet part. I’m not really into tokenomics and if you look at the price you can clearly see that the NYM token got dumped on the market by initial investors (like most crypto projects), will see how it plays in the future but I think they are right that the main issue with Tor is that nodes don’t have economical incentive and thus is compromised by feds allowing targeting deanonymization attacks on specific users.
Sonalder explained it very well. I just want to emphasize that it’s much more private than any other vpn because its impossible for Nym to keep logs.
I also want to add to his comment that it’s like Tor network but a decentralized one. As there aren’t as many and as fast nodes as in Tor, it’s slower. Here is the owners conversation with the Youtuber The Hated One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVtw-4Eox2E
New Mullvad competitor?
