NymVPN, the claimed "most secure VPN in the world" was launched at London's Frontline Club on March 13th..
Alongside famous activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the NymVPN team presented the official version of NymVPN to the public for the first time.
The Switzerland-based provider enters a crowded market of the best VPNs with a clear goal: to revolutionize what it believes to be a flawed industry, with Nym CEO Harry Halpin claiming "Digital privacy is broken."
End-to-end encryption "isn't enough"
NymVPN aims to solve an often overlooked area of digital privacy – metadata protection.
Existing virtual private networks (VPNs) and other privacy tools mostly use end-to-end encryption to keep you private online. This technique essentially scrambles the content of your communication to prevent third-party access.
However, Halpin explained, even encrypted messages leave traces, such as who you are talking to and when. With advanced tech like AI, metadata monitoring is becoming increasingly easy to do.
"And that's quite dangerous," said Halpin. "As the [Edward] Snowden's leaks revealed, if you have enough metadata, you won't really need the content."
A novel approach: the mixnet
The need for metadata privacy has been clear to some in the industry – certainly to those who formed the Nym team behind the first iteration of the mixnet – for some time.
Indeed, cryptography professor and now Nym Chief Scientist Office Claudia Diaz did a PhD on mix networks, a theory proposed by the cryptographer David Chaum in the 80s, between 2000 and 2005.
In 2016, Chelsea Manning began work on a way to make Tor Browser and similar privacy-preserving tools more secure, while in prison for leaking US government classified documents to WikiLeaks. She said: "We recognized that the amount of computation that was going to become accessible in the next decade was going to make it much easier for traffic analysis to be able to decipher anonymity across network."
In December 2017, Manning would meet with Halpin as he was also beginning to consider such a system to better protect metadata. Fast forward to 2025, NymVPN is the first VPN iteration with a noise-generating mixnet system that claims to protect these little – yet important – digital traces we all leave behind.
As Ania Piotrowska, Head of Research at Nym, explained in more detail during the product launch, the NymVPN mixnet includes three fundamental components:
- A multi-server routing system. This ensures your connection is rerouted via five independent hops, so no single entity should be able to link your IP address with your activity.
- Cover traffic. The network randomly generates traffic to make metadata tracking more difficult. It basically seeks to hide your communication patterns within a noisy crowd of fake internet traffic.
- Data packet mixing. On the way, the data packets get shuffled to make sure to cover the timestamp while confusing the order the data packets move between you and the receiver.
Not forgetting the old good VPN features
While NymVPN seeks to set itself apart from the competitors with its noise-generating mixnet technology, a decentralized server network, and a token-based anonymous payment system, the provider hasn't forgotten the features that VPN users expect in a secure VPN app.
Fully open-source, NymVPN apps are available for all major platforms (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux). They include a kill switch and leak prevention features to ensure that if the VPN connection drops, your data remains protected. At the time of writing, you can choose between 500+ server operators across 50+ countries.
All apps are built on Rust, a relatively new coding language believed to be better for security and performance – ExpressVPN has recently rewritten its in-house Lightway protocol in Rust.
NymVPN COO Alexis Roussel confirmed the team is also working on a split tunneling option. This will not only allow you to customize which apps and websites reroute through the VPN tunnel, but also decide which ones to protect with its Wireguard-based AmneziaWG two-hop mode (so-called Fast mode) and those via the most private (but slower) Mixnet mode.
The new default for data privacy?
NymVPN may be moving its first steps into a crowded VPN market, but it promises to make waves to fix what the team believes to be a flawed digital privacy industry.
The ultimate goal, however, is even more ambitious – NymVPN wants to become the new default for data privacy.
"Nym is starting with a single VPN app which allows people anywhere around the world to access and benefit from the privacy properties of our network," explained Ania Piotrowska, Head of Research at Nym. "But the network opens the door to more integrations that can provide privacy solutions by default across various industries, from healthcare to legal services and telecommunications. We believe that privacy is a basic right and we want to provide a solution that's going to be accessible by everyone in any type of online situations."
