What is NymVPN? Everything you need to know

A guide to the world’s most private Virtual Private Network

10 mins Read
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Make your traffic as untraceable and private as possible: this is NymVPN’s core objective. With a truly decentralized network, NymVPN aims to provide the strongest digital anonymity currently achievable. Years of work by scientists and privacy-activists have designed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that protects user privacy not as a promise, but by design.

Most VPNs don’t protect you

Our privacy online is not protected in the same way as it is offline. What’s worse, our personal data online is being systematically exploited by many different agents. AI and machine-learning technologies are now making these threats to privacy much more severe.

VPNs have been the go-to solution for online privacy for decades. But what many may not realize is that the majority of VPNs on the market no longer adequately protect us. This is due to the way they centralize the data of our traffic, making us sitting ducks for cyber criminals, data trackers, and surveillance.

NymVPN is here to change that. With advances in cryptography and decentralized software, users can now have genuine anonymity online with the click of a button.

Want to learn more about how VPNs work and what they are used for? Check out Nym’s guide to VPN technology.

What is a VPN?

NymVPN in a nutshell

Serious online anonymity comes with a technical price: speed. In order to adequately unlink what you do online from your identity, and to protect against advancing AI data tracking efforts, decentralized networks are needed. The more servers that relay your data, the more anonymous you are, but the slower your traffic will be.

Thankfully, NymVPN offers an easy in-app choice so you can customize your own privacy needs.

  • When you need maximal privacy protections, simply toggle on the Nym Anonymous mode. With one click, your messages or transactions have unparalleled metadata protection, becoming extremely hard to trace. This is possible because of Nym’s novel routing through its mixnet (short for mix network) of 5 independent servers.

  • And for all other traffic that requires low latency, like streaming and browsing: no problem, simply toggle on the Fast mode for high speed connections through WireGuard. You will still have more anonymity than any centralized VPN can provide.

Want to finally guarantee that what you do online is truly private, anonymous, and secure? Here’s everything you need to know about how NymVPN works and what makes it so different from other VPNs available today.

Why is a VPN needed?

What’s the point of a VPN in the first place?

There is more traffic flowing over the open internet than ever before in human history. There has been major progress in ensuring strong privacy protections for digital communication. This includes end-to-end encryption has become the norm, protecting the content of messages.

But the problem is that the patterns of our communications are still visible. Surveillance watching traffic flow across the internet can easily trace who is speaking to who, from where, at what time, and from what device, etc. This can reveal a lot about us, particularly our long-term browsing habits, which can lead to knowledge about our desires and details about our personal lives.

This makes the personal data and activities of ordinary people all over the world at risk. And the micro-details of our digital lives have long become a commodity in both legal and illegal data markets.

Here are the big agents at work in tracking our every move online.

What does NymVPN do for you?

Imagine you’re being followed. You don’t know by whom, or why. You try to speed up, to take obvious detours, but nothing seems to work: the tail is always there. When it comes to being online, there is nothing paranoiac about this feeling. As we’ve just seen, the reality is that we are being followed and tracked in everything we do.

NymVPN offers a new technological strategy: get lost in the noise of the crowd. Imagine now that you find a large gathering, like a street festival, in which everyone is dressed the same. By jumping in with them, adopting the same dress and behaviors, you’re suddenly anonymous amongst others. Finding you becomes exceedingly difficult.

Benefits of NymVPN

There are three technological pillars that make NymVPN an unparalleled privacy tool:

  1. State-of-the-art, multi-layered encryption
  2. A truly decentralized network
  3. Added network noise to confuse data tracking

Let’s deepdive into how NymVPN accomplishes these three goals.

1. Encryption with NymVPN

Encryption is a crucial part of online data security. It ensures the content of your data is illegible in transit. Like other VPNs, NymVPN first encrypts your data before masking your IP address. Traditional VPN services only do this once and then route your traffic through their centralized servers.

NymVPN gives users the choice to use two distinct routing modes, each of which use distinct encrypted routing protocols:

Hops

Encryption protocol

Network

Anonymous mode

5

Sphinx

Noise Generating Mixnet

Fast mode

2

AmneziaWG (WireGuard)

Nym dVPN

See how WireGuard compares to other major VPN routing protocols.

2. Routing with NvmVPN

Aside from encryption, the core privacy feature of a VPN is its server architecture: how many proxy relays are used to route traffic, and thus how many times your IP address is obscured?

Most VPNs on the market are single-server and thus centralized routing systems. This means they have central points of failure, for attack or surveillance, leaving the sender and destination of a message at risk.

To address this problem, NymVPN delinks sender from destination by routing traffic through either 2 or 5 independent and decentralized servers. You choose, depending on your privacy needs!

Whether you use the Fast or Anonymous mode, your traffic will be relayed through a network of multiple independent servers (or nodes) that are run by independent operators all over the world.

Here’s how your traffic is routed differently through the two NymVPN modes.

Anonymous: Noise Generating Mixnet

Nym's Noise Generating Mixnet

Types of noise

Definition

Data fragmentation

When your data passes through the mixnet, it does not travel in one piece that can be intercepted as a whole. Rather, it is broken up into identically sized packets.

Traffic mixing

As your data packets pass through a mixnode that relays them, the packets are mixed up with the traffic of other users. This makes data tracking extremely difficult.

Cover traffic

Empty dummy packets introduced by the app to increase the anonymity set of NymVPN users

Timing obfuscation

Packet mixing prevents traffic correlation based on timing signatures in the routing process

Through these network privacy-enhancing techniques, the Nym mixnet provides robust anonymity for whatever you do online that no other VPN can offer.

What is NymVPN used for?

Regardless of which NymVPN mode you choose, NymVPN is a tool for being anonymous in what we do online. This could be to:

  • avoid external surveillance
  • bypass unjust censorship laws
  • undermine mass data tracking efforts
  • access foreign-based content
  • or simply to enjoy private browsing

Here’s what Nym thinks the two VPN modes are particularly useful for:

Uses

Anonymous mode

Ideal for protecting crypto transactions, private communications through instant messaging and email, sensitive data transfers, torrenting

Fast mode

Great for private browsing, streaming, gaming, etc.

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