While it's still too early to tell whether it will ultimately win the title of best VPN app, the service that promises to be the “world's most private VPN” has just launched its public beta test.
First introduced during last year's Web Summit conference in Lisbon, NymVPN was developed as a solution to the problem of provider reliability thanks to a revolutionary method of protecting people's online activities. The goal is ambitious: to offer users TRUE privacy.
However, at that time, only the alpha version was available, meaning that only those on the waiting list could try it out. Now, everyone can start testing NymVPN's features completely free of charge.
Rest in peace, Alpha! #NymVPN@harryhalpin officially announced the public beta testing phase at @Web3summit in Berlin yesterday. Nym has come full circle, where the Mixnet project was first announced in 2019. pic.twitter.com/4Q986c6aVdAugust 22, 2024
Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin chose the stage at the Web3 Summit in Berlin to officially kick off beta testing on August 21 (see tweet above), giving attendees a glimpse of the product.
“We’re proud to launch NymVPN for public beta testing at Web3 Summit, where we brought Nym out of stealth mode for the first time in 2019,” said Harry Halpin. “We promised then that privacy technology could empower the people, and now we’re proving we can deliver!”
A different kind of VPN
A VPN, short for virtual private network, is a security software that encrypts your internet connection and spoofs your IP address. It does this by rerouting your data in transit through one of its VPN servers using an encrypted tunnel.
Beyond the technicalities, all you need to do to use a VPN app is choose a server location and hit connect. The main difference between NymVPN and other VPNs is that in this case, the first thing you need to decide is how you want your traffic to be redirected:
- Quick mode It’s ideal for everyday online activities like messaging, casual browsing, and streaming. It offers, as the name suggests, better connection speeds. In this case, the VPN service spoofs your IP address by rerouting traffic through a completely decentralized network running on two-hop servers. With high-speed WireGuard support coming soon, expect performance to improve even further.
- Anonymous mode This is the ideal choice for protecting highly sensitive activities and what really promises to set NymVPN apart from the competition. Not only is traffic rerouted through five different servers, but it is also covered with “network noise” to make it even harder for spies to intercept it.
“With advances in AI-powered data analytics, data surveillance is becoming increasingly powerful. What is needed are sophisticated decentralized networks capable of confounding all attempts to track us, not just today but in the future,” the provider explains in a blog post.
As the image above shows, NymVPN’s Mixnet method employs several network strategies to confuse data surveillance efforts. These include data fragmentation, dummy data packets, time delays, and data packet reorganization.
As Halpin told me when the company first launched NymVPN in Alpha in November: “AI models collect a lot of data by finding some patterns in it. Our VPN does the opposite. We aggregate fake traffic, we mix the traffic, we alter the pattern. To some extent, what we're building looks like a VPN, but it's kind of an anti-AI machine.”
How to use NymVPN beta
The team behind NymVPN invites everyone to start using the VPN, test their skills, and provide feedback.
All you need to do to get started is go to nymvpn.com and enter your email address. Wait a few minutes and check your inbox to validate your subscription.
In the meantime, you can download the NymVPN app on your chosen device. The service offers a dedicated app for all major operating systems, namely Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and even Linux.
At this point, you should have received an anonymous credential that you can copy and paste into the Add Credentials section of the NymVPN app in Settings. You're now ready to find out for yourself if this really is the most private VPN out there.
We test and evaluate VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. We protect your online security and strengthen your online privacy when you are abroad. We do not support or tolerate illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Future Publishing does not endorse or approve the consumption of pirated content for which you pay.
