The Brave browser, and the related Basic Attention Token (BAT) project, have been doing very well in 2019. They have gone on to be mentioned in popular tech publications and are quickly gaining traction among users who fall outside the traditional cryptocommunity.

After hitting 350,000 verified publishers, 8 million active users and reaching 50 million downloads on Android, the Brave team is on the cusp of reaching another milestone - they have released plans for an implementation of a distributed Virtual Private Network (VPN) called VPN0.

The team is tackling the challenges associated with dVPNs, namely performance, privacy guarantees and traffic accountability. The team claims that this will be the first dVPN that will offer “a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation system.”

This kind of VPN differs from centralized ones in that users act as both clients and relay/exit nodes. Most importantly, the nodes can decide what kind of traffic they want to transmit. For example, they can agree to transmit traffic only coming from news websites.

Why Is It Exciting?

VPN use over the years.

Source

This is an important development for Brave in several respects. For one thing, it adds a privacy preserving feature that is more popular than ever before. VPN usage has been increasing year on year and to have it integrated into a major browser is a testament to both security and privacy efforts.

VPN search interest.

Brave’s dVPN is unlike anything we’ve come across before, and the ability to incentivize the solution with BAT tokens could lead to even quicker growth and usage, as has been the case with the Brave browser in general.

Brave is already taking off in a way that most altcoins would be jealous of, but this just gives additional incentive to use BAT, which is already doing well with its Brave Ads feature. It looks like the team has offering much more privacy on its agenda - which could really help it go much further.