Brave, the web browser winning over the crypto community recently published research on their decentralized VPN. VPN⁰ is still being tested, but it promises to solve the risk of peer to peer hosting through other decentralized VPN solutions.

Why decentralize a VPN?

Many American crypto traders don’t like U.S. exchanges because they don’t let you lose your money quick enough. This pushes U.S. traders to purchase a VPN and access sites with margin like BitMex. Decentralized products generally don’t require identification to use, and anonymity is popular in that trading crowd.

Crypto enthusiasts also tend to be more familiar with the ability to keep others from selling your data. That is the main appeal of decentralizing a VPN. There are many VPNs who sell your data to third parties.

Right now you can choose a decentralized VPN that connects you to someone else in the world who might be doing illegal things with it, one that sells your data, or one that is pricier than a Netflix subscription.

Brave doesn’t discuss any subscription fees, but promises to be a solution for the first two issues mentioned.

How do they do it?

They do it by using long winded cryptographic techniques that I won’t bore you with. Essentially, it all boils down to this quote.

“VPN⁰ allows relay nodes to control which traffic they transmit, without learning what content it contains”

In order to make sure it worked for real world usage, they integrated their tech with ProtonVPN, OpenVPN and Mainline using a Raspberry Pi. Everything worked out, and they think they can beat out any competition.

“This post has presented VPN⁰, to the best of our knowledge, the first dVPN with strong privacy requirements and high performance.”

Speed of VPN⁰s zero knowledge calculation is the bottleneck they claim to be researching now. There is no release date, but if everything works like they say it will and is affordable, the product will likely win over crypto traders and blockchian enthusiasts.