Hi all! During the last few weeks we had a couple of Reddit AMA sessions (ask me anything) to spice up our communication. We will be doing more of those in the future but today we have quite a bit of news and want to place them right here on Medium.

For your attention, our updated Roadmap

In order to create a successful technology one must first understand the landscape of its future use.

Mysterium technology is being designed to stop breaches into our privacy today as well as tomorrow. This is why we need to put a lot of effort into understanding future use-cases, users, their problems and overall technology trends.

Our observations point us towards a future built on open source, decentralisation and empowerment principles. In this world we will see lots of peer to peer communication, powered by protocols and dApps which don’t rely on accumulating your personal information with a goal to monetise it without your conscious consent (that’s todays world). Instead, we will see Protocols and dApps competing among each other in order to provide you with a better service while giving you means to stay in complete power over your personal information.

Such applications will present you information while the origins of it will come to you from countless different places (very different to today’s model), yet you will not feel it because various trustless protocols will route that information securely towards the destination (screen of your phone as an example).

In other words, peer to peer communication will take place in a completely decentralised fashion where you as an individual will rely on a multitude of protocols protecting your personal integrity and identity security. Various trustless protocols are being developed right now with this goal in mind, they range from decentralized payments to storage or communication etc.

At the core of it, it’s all about communication. If it is breached at some point within the chain — your personal information could be hacked and leaked into unwanted hands. Thus, creation of a protective layer must not be taken lightly.

At Mysterium, our goal is to create a protective layer on top of any communication taking place within this new decentralised ecosystem.

This protective layer could be applied to all kinds of communication: be it peers talking over a video chat or nodes communicating important data to each other. With this goal in mind we created a Roadmap taking us towards this desired future.

We are starting with a VPN. Significant milestones for 2018 include VPN clients for key OSes (macOS, Win, Linux, Mobile), opening possibility for anyone to run a VPN node, development and cultivation of initial partnerships and implementation of payments proof of concept.

From this point we will keep on improving the protocol and network by adding more complexity such as: decentralising payments, decentralising discovery, adding multi-hop routing, creating a marketplace of traffic tunneling protocols, and eventually creating an complete End-to-End communication protection, where any App/dApp developers would be able to integrate a secure and virtually unstoppable communication channel right into their app, for any two peers to communicate among each other without any unwanted third party interfering or even knowing that communication took place.

Mysterium Network Roadmap

Development update

During the last few months we focused on laying out foundations for Mysterium Network — we’ve been working on the Node, making it secure, usable and prepared for future scalability. On the top of it we’ve built our first use case — a VPN application — and tested it throughly with an initial group of testers. Throughout this process we’ve received some incredibly valuable feedback, insights and ideas for further development.

Let us tell you more about the network development and then share some insights from the testing.

We tested our Node software on different Linux distributions and different hardware, while running nodes on many different Hosting providers servers. They mostly worked for us well enough with a couple of exceptions with those service providers that have different hosting service setups where our Node was not operating, or had some issues. To name a couple of issues: if a hosting provider has an OpenVZ (container-based) virtualization setup, one cannot run docker containers; some service providers block UDP protocol, etc. We’re preparing documentation on how to solve the known issues with different service providers and a basic checklist helping to identify why a node is not operating as intended.

We improved Node compiling scripts to make them more universal, not attached to our case. We are constantly updating infrastructure deployment scripts to save devops time.

By running nodes ourselves, we’ve noticed some problems in Node communication and proposal broadcasting to the network. Now they are fixed.

Our users noticed that some nodes become unreachable. We investigated this issue and added upgrades to Node service proposal announcements, upgraded proposal announcement validity algorithm, solved connection establishment to Node through Broker issues (after Broker is not reachable for some time), Node lockup and self shutdown problems.

We made a connection state refactoring on Mysterium Client to have a more fluent connection process. Now our VPN app (we call it Mysterion) will show instantaneous feedback on the current connection state.

There were more small fixes and service adjustments made to have a stable and easily scalable TestNet network. You can see all updates on our GitHub profile https://github.com/MysteriumNetwork.

Mysterion Testing results

We’ve been testing macOS VPN client with 3 closed testing groups. As mentioned previously, with the received feedback we’ve greatly improved and stabilized the application and now are looking to significantly expand macOS testers groups. We are observing the speed, performance and continue to make improvements and apply new feature requests as the use of the VPN client and nodes grows.

Also, once Windows and Linux versions of the app are ready, we will invite even more testers to join the testing effort. If you would like to join the testing group, please follow this link.

Some details from the testing

List of node countries that users have been testing: Canada, Singapore, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, and France. We are working to secure additional nodes in other countries and users will soon be able to host nodes from anywhere in the world as well.

List of current countries of testing users: China, United States, Ukraine, Vietnam, France, Belarus, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Netherlands, Ireland, Mexico, Italy, Russia, Portugal, and Hong Kong.

Our VPN client has already helped several members of our testing groups to avoid restrictions to internet access. For example one of our users from the Mysterium Network Chinese WeChat testing group recently visited from Hong Kong to mainland China and was able to continue their business with no hassle thanks to our Mysterion VPN software. The Russian community has also been affected by the ban on Telegram in their country but have been able to successfully use our product and continue to provide us with valuable feedback. We have also received a lot of interest from other countries that face government restrictions (like Iran) and will soon include additional testers from these countries in our groups.

We are looking for people from our community who would like to run nodes for testing purposes as we are working to release node software that users with some server administration experience can run as 3rd party nodes. In the future we will have a more user friendly version that does not require advanced technical expertise to run nodes as we want everyone to be able to participate.

The team

In a few weeks we’ll be joined by two new colleagues — Senior Legal Counsel and a Senior Accountant. We will introduce them properly once they’ve joined the team but it’s tough to hide our excitement.

Job Openings Available

We are seeking to build a team of dedicated professionals, eager to take security and privacy to the next level.

Thanks for reading this far! :) Expect more news at the end of the month.