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 Brave, of all browsers?
It is worth understanding why a web browser was researching VPN technology at all. Brave built its reputation on privacy: it blocks third-party trackers and ads by default, which is a large part of why the crypto community took to it. It also has its own token, the Basic Attention Token (BAT), built on Ethereum, which powers an opt-in advertising model where users can choose to view privacy-preserving ads and earn BAT in return, with a share flowing to publishers. According to the official BAT project, ad matching happens locally on the user's device rather than through server-side tracking — the same privacy-first philosophy that makes a decentralized VPN a natural extension. Gemini's overview of BAT explains that model in more depth.
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 — which is precisely the problem a privacy-focused product is meant to avoid.
At the time, your options were unappealing: a decentralized VPN that connects you to a stranger who might be doing illegal things over your connection, one that quietly sells your data, or one priced like a premium streaming subscription. Brave did not discuss any subscription fees, but promised to solve 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.
That is the clever part. In a peer-to-peer VPN, your traffic passes through other people's nodes, and normally the operator of a relay node has to trust that you are not routing something illegal through their connection. VPN⁰'s design lets relay operators filter traffic by category without being able to see the actual content — resolving the tension between operator safety and user privacy that undermined earlier decentralized VPNs.
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 believed they could 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 said they were researching. There was no release date, but the direction fit Brave's broader bet: that a meaningful number of users will choose privacy if it is made convenient. For a related take on how privacy technology restores properties that transparent systems break, our coverage elsewhere on the site touches on the same theme from the payments angle.