NymVPN launches fully decentralized VPN amid privacy crackdown

Privacy protocol Nym has launched NymVPN, which it describes as the “world’s most secure VPN” and says will help protect users from government, corporate and AI surveillance.

The release comes amid an increasingly hostile global environment for privacy-focused products — one that is seeing governments crack down on privacy projects and demand backdoors to encryption.

The decentralized VPN, which launched on March 13, uses the Nym protocol’s “mixnet” to keep users fully anonymous and ensure no metadata can be linked to any specific user, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph.

Halpin and Nym security adviser Chelsea Manning sat down with Jonathan DeYoung, co-host of Cointelegraph’s The Agenda podcast, to discuss the release, the importance of privacy and how Nym plans to navigate what seems to be an increasingly precarious privacy space.

How NymVPN’s mixnet works

Halpin and Manning appeared on The Agenda podcast back in December 2023 to discuss what was then their upcoming VPN project. Halpin explained that mixnets work by sending encrypted data across multiple servers while also adding “a bit of fake data” to throw off whoever may be attempting to surveil the traffic, such as an advanced AI algorithm.

“Each packet is like a card, and it like shuffles the pack of cards and then sends it to the next server and sends it to the next server,” Halpin explained.

This is in contrast with traditional centralized VPNs, where everything a user does is routed through the VPN provider’s servers and where customers must put their trust in a specific company. Halpin said:

“If you send your VPN data to ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Mullvad VPN, they know everything about you. They know your IP address. They connect to your billing information. They know what websites you’re going to. It’s actually kind of scary.”

Developing privacy software amid global crackdowns

A few months after their Agenda podcast appearance, Alexey Pertsev, a developer for crypto mixer Tornado Cash, was convicted of money laundering charges and sentenced for his role in developing the privacy protocol — a move that sent shockwaves through the industry.

According to Halpin, Nym is less likely to face the same sort of legal trouble because it’s not financial infrastructure. “In all countries except a few repressive ones, VPNs are legal, at least for now,” he said. “They fall under what’s called third-party intermediary lack of liability. […] We are not liable, at least under US law, for shipping bits from point A to point B.”

Related: AI makes it even easier for governments to surveil you — Nym CEO

The nature of operating a fully decentralized VPN that can be used entirely anonymously means there is no way to prevent anyone from using it for whatever reasons they want to. Manning said it is not Nym’s role to be “the arbiter or the determiner of what is and is not nefarious.” She added:

“It’s not possible in a fully decentralized environment to stop them [bad actors]. Like we don’t have a way to. If we did, I mean, we would be centralized.”

More recently, various governments have pushed developers to implement backdoors in their encrypted products. Apple withdrew its end-to-end-encrypted iCloud service from the UK market after the government demanded a backdoor, while the US Federal Bureau of Investigation recently told Forbes it wants “responsibly managed encryption,” where “U.S. tech companies can provide readable content in response to a lawful court order.”

Halpin and Manning said that if a government were to ever attempt to shut NymVPN down or arrest its developers, the Nym network is decentralized, so it should be able to continue running as usual. “In theory, we should be able to get run over with a car, and the network would keep operating,” Halpin said.

Who will use NymVPN?

The Nym team was in Ukraine in 2024 to demo the VPN and present it to the Ukrainian government, and a representative from the humanitarian NGO Doctors Without Borders spoke at the March 13 launch event. Halpin also shared that the team has had conversations with people in Syria.

However, an anonymous and decentralized VPN is just that — anonymous and decentralized. This means the team behind it has no way of knowing who is actually using it and what they are using it for, only that it is being used.

As Manning put it, “One of the problems with that question is that if people are using the technology, if they don’t tell us that they’re using the technology, we won’t know.”

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