Brave, the web browser winning over the crypto community, recently published research on a decentralized VPN. VPN⁰ is still being tested, but it promises to solve the risk of peer-to-peer hosting present in other decentralized VPN solutions.
Why decentralize a VPN?
Many American crypto traders do not like U.S. exchanges because those exchanges limit how much risk you can take on. This pushes U.S. traders to buy a VPN and access margin platforms based elsewhere. Decentralized products generally do not require identification to use, and anonymity is popular in that trading crowd.
Crypto enthusiasts also tend to be more familiar with the idea of keeping others from selling their data. That is the main appeal of decentralizing a VPN. Plenty of conventional VPNs sell user data to third parties.
Right now you can choose a decentralized VPN that connects you to someone else in the world who might be doing illegal things over your connection, one that sells your data, or one that is pricier than a streaming subscription. Brave does not discuss any subscription fees, but promises to be a solution to the first two problems.
How do they do it?
They do it using cryptographic techniques that mostly boil down to a single claim:
VPN⁰ allows relay nodes to control which traffic they transmit, without learning what content it contains.
To make sure it worked for real-world usage, the team integrated the tech with existing VPN and proxy software running on a Raspberry Pi. Everything worked out, and they believe they can beat the competition.
This post has presented VPN⁰, to the best of our knowledge, the first dVPN with strong privacy requirements and high performance.
The speed of VPN⁰'s zero-knowledge calculation is the bottleneck they say they are researching now. There is no release date, but if everything works as described and the price is reasonable, the product will likely win over crypto traders and blockchain enthusiasts.