In the past decade, several billion dollar markets have been disrupted by the sharing economy. The hotel and taxi companies have seen their revenues decline dramatically due to Airbnb and Uber. All of these disrupted markets have had the same set of characteristics. Before these new entrants, they had an under-utilized asset (i.e. empty accommodation) and difficulty matching demand and supply. The latter characteristic was solved by big data and smart algorithms i.e. matching accommodation seekers with property owners. The VPN market displays these same characteristics. In 2018, we will see the 60 billion dollar VPN-market utterly disrupted by encrypted peer-to-peer bandwidth.

Meet Skywire, a new internet protocol designed to be faster than the current internet. One of the use cases of Skywire is that it can function as a VPN, the fastest VPN that has ever existed. In terms of bandwidth, you’re going to hit the limits of what your hardware or ISP-connection can process before you hit the limits of what Skywire can provide.

The most groundbreaking aspect of Skywire is that it is free to use and open-source. There are no limits on what geographies you wish to connect to and no data caps involved.

Security is achieved by end-to-end encryption, where only the sender and the receiver know what they’re communicating.

The speed is achieved by Skywires underlying algorithm which can use all possible paths of bandwidth concurrently, meaning the more nodes join the network, the faster the bandwidth and the lower the latency. Simply put, Skywire will have the lowest latency and the highest throughput of any networking protocol.

Testing of the Skywire-VPN has been ongoing since 2017 and it is production ready and expected to be officially announced during the upcoming weeks. However, as the software is open-source and functional, thousands have already downloaded it.

To power this network, selected nodes will be “white-listed” and paid by the Skycoin Foundation in proportion to the bandwidth they supply. Anybody can apply to become a whitelisted node, however, you do not need to be whitelisted to use the Skywire-VPN, as it will always be free to use.

The Skywire-VPN is part of a larger Skywire deployment which will roll out in stages during 2018. When fully deployed (estimated by the end of the year), anybody will be able to supply bandwidth to the network and earn Skycoin doing so. Individuals and enterprises that wish to have even higher levels of service will be able to to so though a paid model, creating the sharing peer-to-peer bandwidth economy.

As Skywire is free, secure and offers higher bandwidth than current VPNs, it is clear that this market will see a revolution in the coming months.

To read more about Skywire, see this article written by the Skycoin Foundation