Mysterium (MYST) is an ERC-20 token that aims to democratize & decentralize VPNs. With the rapid expansion of authoritarian social identity programs, Virtual Private Networks are one of the many ways people seek to cover their tracks online from the prying eyes of governments, ISPs, and anyone else who might be watching.

However, some governments ban IP ranges or ports associated with centralized VPNs, and there are always worries that a central company will fold or hand over information when pressed.

Mysterium Network’s solution to that is a decentralized VPN where users would be able to select from a wide range of VPN nodes in numerous countries & regions, all provided by other individuals who may be harder to track down. In later phases the network hopes to further obfuscate & shred data to make it even less recoverable.

As for the numbers…

There are 23,509,302 MYST currently circulating, with a max supply of 32,433,366. Volume is non-existant, with roughly $515 trading in the last 24 hours between the three trading pairs on HitBTC and IDEX. The market cap was around $1.65mil at the time of this writing. The ICO price was $0.885, and they raised some $13.3mil in funds at the time, according to ICO Bench. Current price is significantly lower, around $.077

A quick look at Santiment shows a healthy dev activity score of 22.07, with only 6 daily active addresses. This would seem to reflect the fact that incentives for VPN nodes have not yet been activated.

The Santiment graph below shows what I call a ‘positive lack of correlation’. That’s a fun way of saying that there isn’t a correlation between dev activity & price action, which is a good thing. For an awful lot of projects, you can see that devs are most active when the price is good — and less active when it dips considerably. That isn’t the case, here, with the price & volume being completely dead, but dev activity remaining fairly consistent.

The whitepaper is an absolute abomination, and I’m going to chalk it up to a team that doesn’t speak English as a first language. The thought that this version may have been farmed out & paid for will forever haunt my dreams, though, as it is a barely readable mess in so many ways.

At some points it rambles incoherently about Phases and Stages without ever really laying out what any of them mean, while at other times it trips over itself for several pages just trying to explain the need for VPNs.

I used to think that bad whitepapers were red flags, but I’ve come to realize that some teams just aren’t that great at explaining what they’re trying to do. At the very least we can rest well knowing that this whitepaper was absolutely not plagiarized, and that is a good thing.

On to the team…

Robertas Višinskis is the Founder, and seems to be a bit of a startup junkie. His LinkedIn doesn’t specifically name Mysterium, but refers to it as “Blockchain Startup”, which could be seen as either a red flag or a simple oversight. He looks to have started several other internet projects, with “Trusttribe” being one of the more recent ones.

Trusttribe was to be a ratings system for P2P marketplaces, and received a small €70K seed round from Practica Capital in 2013. Their website now leads to a 404 error. This sort of thing happens, though, and Robertas might well have learned a lot from these experiences. I mention them only for the sake of completion & full disclosure.

Paulius Mozuras is the Co-Founder, Smart Contract, and Python Developer with experience working for AdForm, and confirmed proficiencies with Python from respected peers. LinkedIn does not mention Mysterium, but is instead cheekily naming “in a remote position” as his position.

Valdas Petrulis is another Co-Founder, and the Lead Golang Developer. He also has confirmed proficiencies, and does represent Mysterium as his place of employment on LinkedIn.

The team, as a whole, seems very competent and to varying degrees connect their LinkedIn, with some if not all listing Mysterium as their place of employment. This is a good thing, and I wish all employees updated LinkedIn to rep their blockchain employers; it isn’t great optics for a project if you’re either too ashamed of it to represent, or if your very involvement in the project can be brought into question.

Moving on…the product.

Mysterium has recently released version 0.6.0 of their Android VPN app, so I tried both that version and the Windows PC version. While not on-par with commercial VPNs, as a proof-of-concept I would have to say that Mysterium hits all the right notes.

On either version you can easily select from more than a few countries & nodes, with a few options that have decent speed. The picture below is from the Android version.

I need to charge my phone.

Note that I said “decent” speed. I am on a 100mb connection, and the best had me connecting with 7mb download/upload. This is basically what I would expect from p2p VPNs, as the more dedicated centralized competition is always going to be faster. But is is usable.

I tested it on Netflix and was able to watch region-specific content for Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Japan without any issues.

The Android app is the more feature-rich version at this point, with the newest version adding support for both OpenVPN and WireGuard protocols.

All-in-all, I find it impressive that this team is still actively developing with very little support from the market. Of course, they did make a substantial amount of money in their ICO, and the most important feature of their app still isn’t active. Until we see payment channels & an active economy develop around the Mysterium VPN, nothing about this project’s future is certain. That said, a team with a working proof-of-concept that is still plugging away at Github may warrant a deeper look. I’ll leave that up to you.