Moderator  0:00  
All right, good morning, good evening, everyone for joining in wherever you've been able to tune in today for our ama session here on the buffalo gems. And today we have Brien Colwell, who's actually going to be representing the your network community, of your network team. And I know each and every of you are all wondering what the your network is, and we are going to find answers to all of your questions today, but just Just a heads up, an introduction, the your network is actually a decentralized networking platform that emphasizes privacy, availability and security, and the team actually aim to provide a network powered by the people around you, which is suggesting a pet to bear infrastructure, rather than a reliance on a centralized server. One of their key features and their collaborations include a VPN alternative, the Solana mobile partnership, and also the community engagement is actually one of their core features. So we're going to learn more

and find more. And if you, if you have more more options outside the AMA sessions community, and you still want to get much more information, do visit your x profile, which is at your underscore, your underscore network, and you can also check out their discord. Our links have actually been posted and pasted on detect the telegram page right here. But I don't want to give everything up away, and that's why we have Ben Colwell here to represent and give us much more details and much more info into the project. A big welcome to you, CO and Brien. Hope you have a lovely day so far.

Brien Colwell  1:38  
Yeah, thanks for having me here and excited to speak with the community and present your network the project. So as a quick intro to your network, we are a new type of VPN, but we're also a distributed team. So I'm based in San Francisco, Bay Area in California.

We have another team member based in Japan, and we have other team members distributed around the United States. So primarily, we're based in the US, but, but we're also, you know, a distributed team, and we're coming at you from all over the world. So I'd love to just jump in and let you know more about the project. So does that sound like a great place to start?

Moderator  2:28  
Yes, that actually does sound like a great place. You actually took some of the questions actually what is asked about, which is introduction about yourself and where you guys are from. But that's really good. So we would like to really know what the your network is all about, why it was created, what problem you saw that made you create the your network, and what you tried you're trying to achieve with the project that you've created so far. So so far, the mic is all yours.

Brien Colwell  2:55  
Awesome. Thank you. So yeah, I've been a VPN user, a privacy advocate, for a long time, I've always been using a VPN, and in the United States, it's not super clear all the time why you need a VPN today, although it's becoming more clear as even in the United States, different states are Having different NET regulation and net laws, especially privacy laws, and actually censorship on what you can access to the United States as you know, as I got older and traveled the world more, I started to realize that VPNs were not sort of like this optional privacy thing, but Actually were essential to have an internet that works correctly. So from the US, as I travel around the world, a lot of the services and sites I use in the United States in my home country were not working. And as I met more people, they have a very similar experience. So regardless of where your home country is, there is a large portion of the internet that is not accessible or not working for you. And so this is a really interesting problem, because technically, you know, you can physically travel and move, and you can, for example, get an Airbnb or hotel, and wherever you go in the world, you have this expectation that you go there and you know, you're a guest, and the internet just works, and everything's fine, but sort of without physically moving, having that same level of experience seemed to be very difficult, and so I've been a user of many commercial VPNs for a long time. And I think, you know, if you kind of look at how commercial VPNs are built, typically like, you know, the big names, they're built in a way that looks like a giant Hotel. So, rather. Other than sort of like an Airbnb, where, you know, you kind of become part of the community that you connect to, you're sort of stuck in this giant hotel. And why that's why that's not great is basically the internet doesn't work great from these giant hotels. So if you look at these major VPN services, they have on the order of 1000s of servers. And so these servers can actually be identified and filtered and treated differently on the internet. And so the overall architecture of sort of moving around the world digitally, just like you would move physically, but you're sort of put in these very special locations when you move digitally. Doesn't really work as the internet gets more sophisticated. As you know, services get more sophisticated, and so we started this project your network, to really look at the problem holistically, to stay take a step back and think about the core problems of privacy, security and availability from a new perspective that would sort of, you know, rethink the way that these networks are even built and so so many VPNs, for example, have an emphasis on privacy and security. I want to point out that as a project, we have an emphasis on privacy, security and availability, and so that's like a really big part of our project, which is, you know, there's really two parts of availability that we think sort of get historically ignored with many of these VPN projects. So from as a user, when I connect to an intermediary overlay server, like a VPN server, a lot of times, what happens is that connection between me as a user and that server gets filtered or blocked, and so I can't even connect to sort of like the intermediary. And then there's also another piece of availability, where the connection from the intermediary server to the internet also gets blocked or are treated differently. So you'll see that, for example, if you try to access a site and it says, you know, like, you know, VPNs aren't allowed to use this site, or, you know, you're not allowed to access this site for some reason. And so those are like two really interesting problems for us to like focus on. Early on, we're also really focused on this idea of privacy and how transparency affects privacy. So something we noticed across the board with many commercial VPN services is that they're running in a very opaque way, meaning you can't really see the server code. There's actually not a single commercial VPN that that I'm aware of that has open source servers. And so generally, this idea that you know, as a, as a tool and as a, as a protocol, where you're sort of sending all your data. It was running, you know, very counter to, I would say, security culture and internet culture, which is about transparency. It's about, you know, hard cryptography, hard privacy, making, you know, making decisions at the protocol level that are mathematically, you know, guaranteed or mathematically aligned with the outcome. And so, you know, something we saw really happening is that the guarantee of privacy that traditional VPN service was offering was really a guarantee of trust, meaning, if you trusted the service they could you would trust that they would like, you know, delete your data and not log your data and, you know, not, you know, not share your data, etc. But it was really, it was really based on trust. And so we felt like in this area, too, there was an innovation that could happen that was based more on a sound hard privacy that wasn't, that wasn't driven by trust, that was just driven by by the pure mechanics of the network and how the data sent over the network and so, so that's what, that's really why we started the project, is, you know, we had an issue with transparency with the major VPNs. We also had an issue with availability. And you know, I think on a third point on the security aspect, what we kind of saw happening on security and cryptography was a lot of VPNs are stuck in a certain mindset in terms of they're using a certain type of cryptography and a certain protocol almost across the board. And meanwhile, you have a very community standards, open standards approach happening on the web. And so if you look at like the standards body of the IETF, which is the Internet Engineering Task Force that defines a lot of the cryptographic standards that are used by the Internet. It, they were going in a new direction, right? So IETF had, is the body behind the TLS Transport Layer Security Standard. That's the s that you see on the end of HTTPS so that's what, you know, all of websites use this, the security standard. They're, you know, evolving various availability standards and standards to help the internet, you know, not be blocked and filtered. And so you had a standards body going in one direction, but generally you had sort of the overlay VPN world was kind of stuck on what I would call open source, but non standard approaches, like wire card, and it seemed like, you know, aligning more with the open standards community, the web standards, the TLS community, would would actually let us, you know, adopt more modern Internet standards. And, you know, go the direction of browsers. And so from a security perspective, we wanted our our client, to look just like a normal web browser, basically. So we didn't want people using our, our our network, to look different than someone using a web browser. And so that was a really important decision too, that we made on the security fronts, was to sort of move, move towards the web standard, the open ITF standards, and away from sort of the more I would say, specialized open source communities, which aren't themselves, even really standards and so, so, so across those three fronts, availability, privacy, security, we set out To make a you know, to kind of rethink how things are done. And so, you know, really, what people want from a user perspective, when you as a user, when you go to a VPN and you just use a VPN, people want reliable internet. They want high quality Internet, and they want speed, I would say, probably in that order, meaning reliability and quality typically Trump speed. For like 95% of the use cases, speed is important. But for most use cases, you know the quality of the internet, meaning, like the internet is available. It's not filtered. Sites just work. Also the reliability of the internet, meaning, you know, like you can just consistently use it throughout the day, and it's a it's there for you are more important than speed for a lot. And so what, what we kind of looked at when we were, you know, thinking about this is, what are the new ways that we can, that we can build a network, right? So we know there's a number of CDNs and VPN services that have 1000s of servers that are, you know, put in data centers and ISP relationships with various proxy networks.

What we really felt was a very simple and concise next step was to take one or two orders of magnitude more nodes. And so we actually kind of had this goal where we said, okay, let's think about two orders of magnitude. If we know that the largest CDNs and VPNs today have like 5000 servers, right? Let's say, how do we get to 5 million nodes, right? And what would a network that has 5 million nodes do for privacy, availability and security? And so what's really cool about kind of thinking about the problem in terms of like, hey, like, what if we had 5 million nodes? Is you start to, like, really see a lot of the tensions between, like, you know, a decentralized system, which is really good for privacy when your data is being sent all over the place, and reliability, meaning, like, you know, if you have 5 million nodes, there's going to be a percentage of those nodes every day that are going on and offline, and, You know, coming in and out, achieving four nines reliability, or even three nines reliability, which, if we just talk about three nines, that means the network is only only out or having issues about a minute every day, every 24 hours, four nines availability, which is what most Internet networks aspire to is actually a matter of seconds every day of unavailability. And so, you know, even just talking about a three nines availability is, you know, it's a very intentional state, like you can't just have a bunch of random like devices coming on and off and and hope to achieve that. And so what we kind of looked at was, okay. We know, you know, our priorities are quality and performance, and so can we sort of engineer our protocol so that we can build quality and performance into the protocol and deliver four, nine reliability just in the way the protocol works? And so, you know what, what we came to is the model that a lot of older overlay networks actually, you know, in our view, every overlay network that's been built today has the same model, which is, it's a user connecting to a single server. So essentially, the user connects to a server. All of the users, sort of connections are are tunneled to that server, and that server, you know, egress is the data. What we wanted to focus on instead is going kind of up a layer, and instead of looking at sort of sending all of the users data to a single server. We wanted to actually look at more of a marketplace where every single connection, every single packet flow, is actually being routed depending on the performance of of the destination. So for example, you could imagine a world where, you know, like, say, you had a million nodes on the network, or 5 million nodes. You can imagine a world where some some websites aren't working right on some of those nodes. Like, like, some of the websites work on some nodes, some of the websites work on other nodes. There's various servers that are blocked here but are allowed here. And so, you know, when we thought about our protocol, we really thought, well, how, how can this protocol sort of adapt to this type of reality, which is a very heterogeneous network with providers of various quality that have different levels of network access. How can we as a protocol make this work? And so we came back to this idea that our protocol is actually going to for every single connection, for every single packet flow, we're actually going to consider what we call a window of providers, or a handful of providers, which are participants on the network, or nodes on the network. And so we're going to consider a handful of these participants and basically create an option between them, or whoever can service that flow or that connection. The best sort of is able to basically service that connection through the life, through the life cycle of that connection. And so what you kind of see in our network is, instead of like taking all the users connections and sending it to a server somewhere, every single connection is being sent to a different to a different node. And so, you know, this is really interesting kind of architecture, because what that means is, as a user of the network, you have many IP addresses. So you don't just have a single IP address. Your IP address really depends on, you know, who's asking. So, different websites, different APIs, different apps, different servers, each see different IP addresses and so. So from a privacy perspective is actually really good. So it's really good to be able to distribute your data. So not all of your data is going through the same server, not all your data is going through the same route. And from a reliability perspective, this is really good as well, because you can imagine in a world where, say, like, 5% of the nodes are sort of becoming unreliable every hour, or coming on and offline every hour. If your connections are distributed in such a way that that one provider can go offline out of you know, say you have you're connected to 12 providers. One of the them goes offline. That only affects, you know, 112 of your connections, meaning it's not like a catastrophic like, oh man, all my apps are reconnecting because one provider went went offline. That happened to be the provider I'm connected to. Instead, what we're able to do is we're able to, if a provider goes offline, we're able to just reroute all of those connections to to the next provider, the next IP and so, you know, it was really kind of interesting, because it was an open question, I think, in the in the network space and the protocol space, whether having multiple IP addresses would actually work, like would the Internet work? Would something break? And I'm really happy to share that the internet does work. Actually, IP address for the vast majority of the internet does not matter. You know, the internet is, by and large, stateless, so meaning your IP address is not being recorded and shared across different connections or services. And so I think these properties generally of the internet mean that, and you know, their privacy aligned, they're aligned with availability, and they're also aligned with creating a massively decentralized, distributed network of nodes. And so that. One of the core, the core directions we decided to take the network is go all in on having this marketplace where, when you connect to a server or API, you're actually choosing between, say, 12 different exit nodes, and you're choosing the one that actually performs the best for that connection, for every single connection, and so this is happening in in our network, for every single connection. There's 1000s, potentially even millions, of these options happening inside of the app every day. And we've just made this extremely efficient and and having zero impact on performance. Because what we've been able to do is we've been able to run the auction so that it's it's optimistic, meaning it doesn't, it doesn't impact your performance. It strictly gives you the best performing outcome. And so, so that's one of the key innovations that we've been working on. And there's a lot of protocol and technology work that that kind of goes on to make that happen. The other key innovation that excuse me. Thank you. The other key innovation that we've really focused on is making it easy and safe to participate in the network. So we look, we spent a lot of time like, I've been a tour user myself. I spent a lot of time talking with people who run Tor exit nodes, looking at, you know, generally, the trade offs between sort of an unfiltered, unmitigated network and sort of the ease and safety of running the network. And I think, you know, there are certain trade offs where the more free you make the network, the harder you make the network to to participate in. So for example, a lot of Tor exit nodes have have a real problem where they get so many legal requests that, you know, it becomes like burdensome to run an exit node. And so that's something that we were, like, very cognizant about that obviously we can't scale a network ethically or realistically if like, a participant in the network is going to have like, all these like issues by participating in the network. And so what we looked at is like, how do we make this easy and safe to participate? Like, like, truly easy and safe. And so we came down to really two ideas on this, on this perspective. The first is, we have decided that instead of doing any logging or sort of proactive

enforcement on the network, meaning, like, you know, if, if bad behavior comes to us, the way that we address bad behavior is we've actually created the security program that runs on the client and the provider side of the network that detects behavior that would essentially get providers into into trouble, into issues and shuts it down securely and privately, so it doesn't log that behavior, it doesn't surface that, it just simply doesn't allow the behavior to happen. And so what's really great about this approach is it's a very privacy preserving way to enforce the network, meaning we do not have any logs on the network, and if we get issues, I'm sorry I'm recovering from some sickness, but if we get issues, meaning like one of our participants says, Hey, like we're seeing some bad behavior happening, and I'm getting like, someone's telling me something bad's happening on my network, what we can do is we can actually just take those issues into our security program and we can turn them into automated rules that run all the time for every single packet and and deploy that widely across the network. And so what's really great about this is that it shuts down behavior that would get, that would get people into trouble, and it also does it in a way that that preserves everyone's privacy. And so, like, we don't have a log, but we're still able to do our best effort and best diligence on stopping bad behavior, and this cycle of taking, you know, both proactive research about the network, so we run a number of proactive honey pots on the network where we sort of try to see bad behavior happening before it becomes widespread, as well as user feedback. We take that into our security program. We update the program and deploy it on a continuous basis. Yes, and that keeps everyone safe on the network, and makes it so that makes it so that everyone who's running the network can say that they're doing their best effort to, you know, to stop bad behavior. And so all of this is open source. All of this is, you know, super transparent. All of our security rules. You can see all the changes and what's going on and so as we grow as a project, this is a major part of our project, basically automating security that keeps both users and participants safe. There's there's a couple other things I mentioned that we were focused on as well, to make sure that the network is easy and safe to use and participate in. The second thing is, we're really focused on end to end encryption on the network, meaning, our view is that people who participate in the network are, you know, untrusted. And it's not to say that, you know, the majority of people participating on the network aren't doing it in good, good faith, but the fact is that, you know, because it's an open network where anyone can participate, there's going to be some, some percentage of bad actors. And so that's really what we look at in terms of, you know, how do we keep people safe on our network, given the sort of inevitable percentage of bad actors? And so the the way that we see that happening on our network is actually what we've done is we've upgraded all of the protocols that are happening over our network to end in end to end encrypted protocols. And so if you look at the web, it's at sort of like a really interesting inflection point today, simultaneously on the web, you have modern end to end encrypted protocols like HTTPS, DNS over HTTPS, running in parallel with older unencrypted protocols like standard HTTP, Standard DNS. So today, what happens is it's entirely possible today to have to use a hybrid of end to end, encrypted and unencrypted protocols, and it's actually very common, like it's very common today, for people to still use HTTPS, but also use unencrypted DNS to resolve the server names. And so, you know, basically, it makes it easy for ISPs and anyone sort of listening to the packets to track, sort of what servers are being communicated with. You know where the traffic's going. So what we've decided to do with with our network is actually force people to move towards the end, to end encrypted standards, and turn off the older unencrypted standards. And so you can think of it like, almost like, what we've done is we've turned off the old internet on our network. So if you try to use the older, unencrypted protocols on our network, they sort of, you know, try to just get seamlessly upgraded to the new ones. And if they can't, they just kind of don't work. And so, so this is really interesting, because essentially, you know, the internet doesn't really have an opinion on, per se, whether you should be able to use insecure protocols or not. But as a network, what we've done is we've made a conscious decision that we are going to turn off the older internet. And so what that what that really means is that users of our network don't have to worry about sort of various providers like snooping on their data or or listening to their data, because what's actually happening is the the connection that the user is making is end to end, encrypted to whatever they're communicating with the server or The API or or whatever service are communicating with, and so that's really important to us, is that, you know, we are focused on making sure that every connection through our network is end to encrypted. You know, this is a obviously, in conjunction with open standards and sort of really looking at where the standards are going but I think this is also one of the big benefits of our approach of aligning with web standards, is that, you know, we can actually engage and participate with, you know, how, how are encrypted protocols being upgraded? Our encrypted protocols being, you know, sort of forced and so, so I think it's a, you know, that's the direction we're going as a network. The other direction that we're going to make it easy to participate is that what we've done is we've actually made it so that every user of the network can also participate in the network. So what you'll see is like, kind of unique to. So our clients and our apps is that when you download our app, you're not you can not only use the network, but you can participate in the network. And so what we've done is, on Android, iOS, Mac OS, we also have provider programs for Windows and Linux, you can actually participate in the network safely in the background all the time. And just just simply by checking a box connecting to the network or checking a box in the app, which is called provide well disconnected and you're able to participate in the network in the background all the time. And so this is, like, super easy for everyone to participate. Over half of our nodes on our network are just phones that people are participating from. And so I think that's a really cool aspect in our goal to get to a million nodes, is that you don't have to, like, have any type of specialized hardware to participate in our network. You can actually use your phone. It works great. It's super fast. It delivers a great result. Also, you can also use specialized hardware if you want to, or custom hardware. We run on pretty much every hardware so, so that's a real that's an intro to what we're doing. We're live in the iOS App Store, the Play Store. We have a partnership with Solana mobile. We're also live on the asteroid open source store, as well as the old store in the EU and so, yeah, over. So thanks for letting me give you that intro. And then, yeah, looking forward to all the questions

Moderator  31:47  
that that was, that was really, really amazing. I'll give you that it was. How do you say it was extensively beautiful. I love, I love the in depth details that you were able to give. And I also want to say, um, I know you're I know you're actually a little bit down with illness currently, so I know how hard it is for you to talk so extensively. Why a little bit down? So my apologies for making you talk so much. But it was really good. I love that. And I also want to apologize again, because I might be taking you back to something you might have talked about. I have a few questions on that, so my apologies if that does happen. But before we get some community questions, one question I actually wanted to talk about was I wanted to know if your network actually supports identity management, that's the IDs or SSIs, and I wanted to know how how developers could be able to interact with that layer.

Brien Colwell  32:56  
Thanks. That's a great question. So, yeah, yeah. So, you know, our dream of the network is to have a private, secure, available network that can be used anywhere. And so the way we've built it is it runs entirely in user space, so you don't have to have root permissions. You don't have to have any special permissions to use or participate in the network, meaning you can basically embed our network in any application. So any application can embed our network, and both use the network, but also participate in the network, meaning you can send data, you know, to that application through the network. We you know, we think this is a really interesting world where, especially as we look at privacy, and we look at, you know, data residency, the the world where you don't care about where data lives or who controls your data, that world you know, might be going away, right? Like assuming that you care more about privacy, you care more about your where your data lives, and it becomes more important about how do you access where your data lives from all of your programs efficiently, right? So like, say, you you want to write programs that that access your data, or, you know, access the internet, some, some part of the internet. There's really two ways you can do that right, like you can, you can move the program to to where the data is, or you can, you know, you can move the data to the program. And so, so we. Think this idea of, you know, connecting programs with what they want to access is sort of like the overall macro theme of what we're building. So we think that, you know, like, the network has always been extremely important. I think, you know, when people talk about what were the the three biggest things that happened in computing right in the last 3040, years. I think, you know, the Internet was number one, or the PC was number one, the Internet was number two, mobile devices were number three, and AI is number four. But I don't think that the internet is not important today. You know, just because we have new technologies, just because we, you know, we're doing a lot more. You know, in terms of data and computation, there's still a lot for us to do in terms of connecting programs with services, connecting programs with data, and that's really kind of what we're focused on at your network, is building an amazing overlay network that is private, secure and available, that you can embed in any program, and you can use it from anywhere. And so today, you know, we're starting as a consumer app. So we have consumer apps, but we're also we have an SDK. You can see our SDK is being used today in our consumer apps, but I think what you'll see from us in the near future, and as we work more with partners, is basically more of a developer SDK, where developers can just embed the network in their programs, whether it's, you know, an app or JavaScript or a server side program, developers will be able to embed the network in their program and use the network, you know, from from their code. And so that is the direction we're going with the network, and that's what, what we're really excited about, you know, we're really excited about a world where we can flip the script, meaning your data doesn't have to go up to the cloud. Rather, the cloud can come to your data and and I think that's, you know, that's really interesting to us, and that's kind of what we're we're overall, like, working towards piece by piece,

Moderator  37:19  
that's, that's a will be amazing. I love that. I love that aspect. I have a couple of questions that are coming in from the community on my DMs and the comment sections, and I would love to, love to get as much community questions so that they could have other questions answered. But before we transition into that, I just got one more question from from my end, and I think my co host also said she had a question also whisper. But before we get whispers questions and the committee question, one thing I had in mind was based off on protection regulations. And I think one of the committee members actually essentially a question regarding da, but basically, how does your network actually ensure compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR, or what's it called CCPA? Yeah, so in terms of that, what's that? What's the concepts you guys are going with that aspect?

Brien Colwell  38:24  
Yeah, yeah. So there's a, there's actually one of the questions that got me, like, really into the network, because I the different regional laws are really interesting because basically, it doesn't, the internet doesn't the laws don't work on where you live, where you're physically based. The laws work on where your data is traveling through. And so, for example, like you can be based anywhere in the world and send your data through California, and the California laws apply and so, so I think that's like, really, really interesting, because you can essentially choose your privacy laws that you want based on where you send your data. And so, for example, like, you'll see this if you send your data through like, for example, send it through Canada, you'll start to get a lot of like, Cookie banners popping up right? If you send your data through Europe, somewhere in Europe, you'll start to see a lot of you know, things turning off, right, disclosures turning off. So depending on where you send your data, you're actually participating in a different privacy law. And I think it's really cool that everyone can essentially choose, choose privacy and choose security that works for them. And so that's something that like, we're really like, I think it's really interesting about, you know, being able to send your data to travel. Level digitally, is you can, you know, just like, if you, like, fly to Sweden, you're obviously now, you know, in Swedish legal system, right? Because you're physically in Sweden. But if you send your data through Sweden, you're also, your data is now in Swedish legal system, and so, so that's a, that's something like, we really value, we really value giving people the choice of where their data should go and and I think people can actually, you know, I think what you'll see is, you'll, you know, I don't know, like, how the internet's gonna evolve, but, you know, I think certain regions of the world are going to be very, very pro privacy and Pro user freedom, and certain parts of the world won't. And, you know, I think for us, you know, connecting people with the regions that work for them is sort of what what we're trying to do, connecting people secure, giving them, you know, more security and privacy. And so in terms of compliance on our side, from from like a network and whatnot, like, so we have a zero logs policy. We have a very small amount of data that we retain about a user. So if you look at our privacy policy, we retain, like, just a very few things, like, we retain an email address. If you give it to us, we retain if you enter your wallet address, we retain your wallet address. But there's, like, a very small amount of data we retain. It's all it's all listed in our privacy policy. And actually, I think it's really interesting to compare our privacy policy to like any other consumer VPI, because we've been very conscious about like, making the set of data that we retain as small as possible. Now, if you look at like, where we as a company have presence, we have presence in the in the US, and also we have presence in Sweden. So those are our two physical sites and and we do, you know, we do operate within the laws of the GDPR with our Swedish data center. And so, you know, we're actively focused on, you know, keeping user data in the right place and doing the right thing with user data. But the amount of data we're collecting is just, like, extremely small. Yeah, yeah. That's

Moderator  42:23  
really it's really good. I was just talking with my brother, who kind of stepped in into the studio with me, and I he had when we're talking about the privacy compliance and the privacy policy, and the next thing he said was that shit. It's always too long, and I could always understand how he feels, because a lot of times when you log in into a new a new platform or a new profile, a new project or a new app, you get to the privacy policy page. It's always too long, and you don't have that time to always open up and read and you just just click, yeah, assets and, and to have something that that you you guys are actually buildings that actually comprise with global, global compliance and, and the words regulation, it's something really amazing and something Something something really fun that's going to attract a lot of persons. It might not happen now, it might not happen tomorrow, but it's going to take its time, and before you know, it's reached a couple of persons and a number of persons around in the world, and it's already known. And so I love the concept you guys are coming with. I love the build. I love the steps that you guys are already taking and the steps that you guys are actually planning on building and to push forward. I want to say big well done to you guys. You guys have done really well so far. It's really amazing. But before, before we transition to get some community questions, I mentioned earlier that my co host, whisper, I think you might know her. Whisper, I heard you have some silent questions for for Brien, so now's the opportunity to get your questions before we get some gaming question. Hi. Whisper, hi,

Speaker 1  44:18  
hi, Brien. It's nice to have you here. I wanted to say I'm sorry about your sickness, and I hope you get better soon. Yeah, so I tell you guys, congratulations on being the number four on produce hunt. I will kick I will start by asking you some questions. Can you hear me?

Speaker 1  44:47  
Okay, so as blockchain is no fun, is 50k TPS, how does your network harness this speed to ensure seamless connectivity in your DPN Network?

Moderator  45:08  
Your your mic is actually your mic is actually muted. Brien, oh, sorry,

Brien Colwell  45:12  
so I guess whisper you didn't hear anything. I said, Thanks for inviting me to to the to this ama today. And okay, so just jump into your question. I didn't realize my mic was muted. So, so we actually started the project as not a crypto project. We started it as, you know, a project just built the best VPN possible. But we realized that crypto plays a unique and special role in building a decentralized, sort of distributed infrastructure like ours, and so it plays a really essential role in terms of, obviously, the incentive system. So you can think of it like, instead of us building, like, a bunch of pops around the world, instead we can, you know, build a network that rewards people, sort of, you know, for the value they're creating. And we can, we can achieve a greater result. And everyone can, can participate in, you know, the value that they helped create. And so I think that that's really unique to crypto is, is the ability to create these incentive systems. I think that also what we've really valued about crypto is the ability to create predictive and markets that can expose information about the system that just wouldn't be possible without the market. And so, for example, like we've really been inspired by prediction markets, and we've been looking at, how do we apply principles of sort of information gathering to our token? And so what we're doing with our token is we're letting people basically stake and predict capacity on the network, so where they want capacity, where they think capacity should be, and get rewarded for, you know, predicting capacity. We think that this, that's a really important function on a network, is to be able to predict work, where, where capacity is needed on the network. We also think crypto can play a really important role in predicting reliability. So for example, you know which providers are expected to be more reliable than other providers, and so you know those, those are the areas that we're actually working on with our token. So today, what we're doing is we're doing a points campaign for basically, if you participate in an hour today, you earn points that will convert to a significant AirDrop when the token goes live and and we're doing a fair launch of our token, so we have not pre sold any of the token. And essentially, the community members who participate will have, you know, the most token on day one from the airdrop. And so that's that's available we traded from day one. So that's, like, super important. So, so What? What? Back to your question, though, about Solana specifically, like, what drew us to Solana? Is it? It was really the two things, one, structurally, Solana expects its fees to go down over time. That's, I think, when you're looking at building a system, you obviously want the cost of the system to go down over time. I think if you look at other blockchains that you know, they all sort of anticipate their fees going up. That's not, that's not great for us, because we, you know, we're trying to build a utility system. And so the the fact that Solana sees their fees going down over time is is really, really good feature of the blockchain. And that's something that for us, like, we really like, we like that. It's low fees that there's the plan is to get even lower fees as as it goes forward. So, so that's a very, I would say it's a very simple reason to choose Solana, but I think it's like a really important reason, because it means that, basically, you can build long term business and value with that. I mean, like, what's the point of building something that, you know, you end up paying, like, so much fees, right? It's just another like, Visa or something, and so, so, so So we like that about Solana. We also like the deep end community generally on Solana. There's a lot of sort of deep in deployer energy going on Solana right now, and so, you know, we're also kind of drawn to that third, I would say, is there's a lot of Solana wallets. So we, you know, we were looking at, basically, what's a network that's just easy for people to use, like to, you know, get tokens, to trade tokens. I. And, you know, Solana is, is, is just, is one of the networks that has all the other properties we're looking for, that also has a lot of wallets, so it checked a lot of boxes. And that's, that's kind of why we decided to go with

Whisper  50:18  
Solana. That's fascinating, actually, love how you're bringing it from the rewards people for the value you bring. Yeah, and you talked about structural fee being down on Zoom. That really, really makes sense. And that's actually thinking smart, talking about the deeping community. My second question is for newcomers to the pin of web three, how does your network ensure a user friendly experience on this learner seeker, especially for non technical users,

Brien Colwell  50:50  
yeah, this is something we put a ton of effort into. So like our network, you can use it as a user and participate in it at the same time. So all you have to do is download the app, connect, and you're both a user and a participant in the network, and you're doing this safely, and you're just sort of earning in the background as you go. And what's happening under the hood is our app is detecting if you're on Wi Fi, unmetered Wi Fi, and if you're on unmetered Wi Fi, what it does is it just turns on the provider. And when you exit Wi Fi, like when you go onto cell network, or if you're on, like a metered internet connection, it turns off the provider. So it's always in the background, turning on and off the provider intelligently. And we do this on Solana seeker. We also do this on on Android generally, and we do on iOS as well. And so, so we put a ton of effort into making our program work well in the background, like all the time and and we think that that's pretty unique in terms of a deep end. A lot of times depends require you to do some kind of custom hardware or, like, something like, that's just not in your phone. And we really wanted to start with, like, like, just starting with the fact that the the hardware platform that has the most hardware in the world today is the smartphone. There are billions of smartphones in the world, and there are billions of sort of used smartphones that are people's like secondary devices that still can be used, that still have value. And we we really wanted to make our product work like first class and really well on the smartphone platform, because we felt like That was just a lot of hardware that was out there in the world that could participate strictly from smartphones. And so it's been a great partnership with Solana seeker and saga, because we've done a lot of integrations. And, you know, behind the scenes, tried a lot of things with them where, basically, you know, we have a very seamless salon experience. You can log in with a Solana wallet. You can connect your wallet to your local Seed Vault on Seeker and saga. So it's a very like, if you have a seeker or saga phone, it's just an extremely seamless experience to participate. It's like, log in with wallet, connect and you're participating. It's a very, very easy experience

Whisper  53:33  
that's actually really amazing. I actually love it when my app works on the background for me and makes it really, really simple and easy for me that will really, really help a lot of people entering into web three for the first time, though, I am showing it to my friends so that they can start earning soon, because I really love the idea behind your network. Okay, for my last question, looking ahead? How do you see looks deep in model transforming internet access, especially in underserved regions with simple or limited connectivity?

Brien Colwell  54:14  
Yeah, yeah. So we're super focused on this as part of our availability focus. So I think like at a high level, what you're seeing us do is we're always keeping our level of service towards what I would call like an ideal internet. So for example, like we recently released an update where we're turning on HTTP three as a transport, on on the on the network. So, like, that's the latest version of HTTP that uses quick and like UDP. But what happens with HTTP three is, like, it doesn't work in a lot of places in the world, like a lot of places. Blog. Docker don't support HTTP three, so our so we started the network supporting just vanilla HTTP, but when we added HTTP three, we also added a transport that was, like, even more available than than HTTP, which is like we've been looking at various other transports, like DNS, that we can use to transport data. And so as as a project, we're always trying to kind of keep our median quality level at, like, the 2000 era internet, right? So, like the old internet that everyone supports, like we're trying to use those older standards and those older protocols that are supported pretty much everywhere in the world. And so whenever we add something like really new and advanced, we're probably going to also add something that's like, works on, like, even more restricted internet, because we're always trying to, we're trying to keep our balance as a project and really focus on servicing both the extremely high end, but also the areas that are having a lot of connectivity issues, in terms of the the physical like connections, meaning like SIM cards, Wi Fi, is we're looking at that a lot. What you're going to see from us in the future is we're actually working on various SIM card partnerships, where, where we're going to do special work with certain SIM cards that are global Sims using the MVNO networks. So that's something we're looking at. We really want people to be able to have complete connectivity through our app. We're also looking at various WiFi partnerships. But I think, you know, something that is really kind of interesting for us is, you know, we think we can help people navigate WiFi. You know, WiFi infrastructure is incredibly spotty and kind of like inconsistent, meaning, depending on where you go, depending on the Wi Fi hotspot you connect to, there's all kinds of, like, random logins and and things you have to do to connect to the internet. Something we're looking at is, how do we make that more consistent and seamless for users? And so I can't announce anything right now, but, but we're very focused on, like, you know, very practical problems. Like, like, I don't want to have to log into a Wi Fi to use it right. I just want the Wi Fi to kind of work in the background and just like, do the right thing. And so, so, yeah, I think, you know, part of our focus is, like, we're not just trying to service like the US and Europe. We're trying to service the entire world. That's very strategic, because we think you know, what's happening in one part of the world today is going to happen in another part tomorrow. And so, you know, we're kind of looking ahead at what's happening and just giving everyone the same tools to work with that. And so, so, yeah, I mean, we're focused on availability. And I think what you're going to see from us is, not only are we going to add like, really high end protocols, but we're going to also going to add like, really interesting new protocols to the product. And you can see our release notes for the latest release in terms of, you know, we've been really, you know, working on adding this new DNS protocol. We call it who dis but it's a new protocol that works on a lot more types of networks, and so, yeah, we're generally focused on both the high and the low end.

Whisper  58:32  
Brien. That's really, really amazing. And I love how we are focusing on the other standard internet. Yeah, because they marry people like my mom, don't want to start using the network, and because they don't understand the Internet, they might not want to use it. So I love how your network is focusing on with our standard and I'm looking forward to the SIM card partnership and the Wi Fi partnership, because they're really gonna help people navigate Wi Fi, logins, and I I I pray and I plan that you make it easier. Anyways, um, I remember when my host is, but that is my question. I don't know how everybody saw that. If you have any questions, you could send it to my host. Thank you. Thank you.

Moderator  59:27  
Thank you so much. Whisper and they were really amazing. Those questions are really awesome. I'm gonna have touched up those, but they were really good. And also, I'm also looking forward to the sim, the same cards and partnerships down. I know you have a lot of partnerships coming up in the coming few months, for 1024, 25 season to the record. So if you if you're good, we could get some few community questions and then see where we go from there over. Right? I think leaders are muted. So CC, you can ask your question.

Speaker 2  1:00:14  
Can you hear me? Yeah. Oh, right, cool. All right. So thank you very much. It's been an honor to be actually looking at the website. And then what caught my attention was when you talked about the the no VPN aspect, right? I wanted to read more. Then I read more, and then I saw that you're going to be like the platform is kind of designed to be incognito mode, right? You know how incognito mode works in Google Chrome, right?

Unknown Speaker  1:00:51  
So,

Speaker 2  1:00:55  
so one question I wanted to ask was, all packets when you browse the internet. All right, these packets are sensory server right now, in your own platform, where are the packets going to be stored? They're going to be stored in blockchain. Is it going to be stored in an actual server, Blockchain, or is it kind of like an actual, you know, normal server where each information is being stored, and then whenever you type in www, dot, you know, it brings out those information comes back to the user. Because, when you're talking about, you know, the use of this accessing of user information to see your information and build time and all and I was kind of wondering how it's going to work, because if you're going to be able to store these packets in an actual server, it still simply means that somebody has access to my data. All right? It's still not encrypted. It's still output, right? So I just wanted to know how the packets work, where it's going to be stored. Now,

Brien Colwell  1:02:07  
yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So, so just to start like when I was saying, we force end to end encrypted protocols on the network. That means when you connect to a server through our network, we're making sure you're using TLS, or some kind of end to end encryption, to make sure that the packets that flow through our network are encrypted. So that's super important to us, because we don't want any step along the path from you to the server you're talking to to see unencrypted packets. So, so that's that's, like, really important to us, because, for exactly the reason you're talking about is we don't want anyone to be able to store or analyze, you know, those packets and so, so we focus on turning off or disabling the unencrypted protocols so that it's like impossible to use unencrypted protocols on our network. You have to use the encrypted protocols, and in terms of where the packets are stored, it's ephemeral. So we we synchronize with the blockchain. We do not transmit data on the blockchain. There's a big problem right now with quantum post quantum so we're currently not running a post quantum suite. That's something we plan on doing, but But basically, what's happening right now is, if somebody does, like, captures your data or stores your data, and then, you know, say, in 10 years, a quantum computer is able to, you know, break elliptical curve cryptography or whatever, in in the future, they can actually decode your packets in the future. And so, like, generally, we're focused on ephemeral packets. Like we don't store packets anywhere. We're focused on getting packets efficiently to the egress node, and then the egress node drops the packets. So I think what you'll see from us, though, coming soon is there's a couple like caveats here, but soon, I think what we're going to want to do is support post quantum encryption suites, and that's going to mitigate more risk about people storing your packets. We're not there yet. There's a number of intermediary nodes that that we need to upgrade but, but I think, does that address your question? So we're focused on end to end encryption through the network, meaning there's no unencrypted packets through the network. And long term, what we want to do is focus on post quantum so. Cipher suites, so that if somebody does capture your encrypted packets, they're using the best post quantum encryption that we know of, like X Wing, so that we can so that they won't be able to decode your packets even with a quantum computer. So that's, that's kind of generally how we see it. Does that make Does that answer your question? All right,

Speaker 2  1:05:26  
yeah, it actually does. So you're simply saying that whenever you guys receive a user's data is encrypted and you guys don't see it, only the users see it. Are we trying to say That's right? Yep. Cool. All right, cool, cool, cool. I just, I just wanted to to know, yeah. Thank you very

Moderator  1:05:50  
much. CC for your questions. I got a question came in from DeBose, and she was asking, how, how? How do I end rewards by sharing my bandwidth or participating in the network?

Brien Colwell  1:06:09  
Great, yeah, thanks. Thanks for asking this question. Um, we have, here's a PDF we're working on, and we have a video we've been working on. I'm going to share that afterwards to to whisper, and I'll figure out how to get that to everyone, but very simply, the way you earn rewards is when you connect to the network, you become a provider. We also have an option called provide while disconnected, so that your provider runs in the background all the time on your phone, you can also go and download a special binary and run it on a Raspberry Pi or your desktop or any other hardware you have, like we have people running it on routers, for example, that'll participate. And so the earnings mechanism is pretty simple. Basically, we're a big marketplace of providers. When somebody uses your location and they send data through your location that gives you votes in our system. And so at the end of the earnings period, which today is four times a month, we add up all the votes, and those votes get proportionally translated to the earnings pool. So today, what we're doing is we're taking part of our revenue and we're putting it in the earnings pool. It's about three to 4000 USDC a month today of earnings that gets paid out. And so the mechanism that happens is we just take the votes and we, you know, everyone has a certain percentage of the votes, and then we pay out the pool based on the percentage of votes. So the voting system is just purely based on data transferred. So if you transfer, like, a gigabyte of data, and there was a terabyte of data transferred for the for that earnings period, you get one, 1001 1,000/1000 of the of the earnings. So, you know, you're just one gigabyte over 1000 gigabytes of earnings. So that's that, as we transition to a token So, so let me just kind of break down the stages of the project. Today, we're paying out USDC. We're paying out three to 4000 USDC per month based on this votes. Starting next week, we're going to start paying out USDC and points. So you're going to be able to open up the app and see see not only your USDC that you've earned, but you're also going to be able to see the points that you've earned. And the way you earn points is the same as as USCC. Every time you transfer megabytes, you get points. Also, whenever you refer someone, you get additional points for them, plus everyone they refer. And when you join the network from a referral, you get a you get points based on who referred you. So if somebody refers you and you join, you get points based on how much, how much they've earned as well. So points is a pretty cool system where, essentially, you can earn 60% more by by getting referred to the network and referring people to the network. Additionally, you earn points by being active on the network. So if you just use the network, you get points, and if you refer people who use the network, you get points. And so, so the next stage of the project starts next week, where you're going to earn USDC plus points, and then in three to four months, when we launch our token, those points will convert to an airdrop of token that that will go to your wallet. So then you'll just have a like a big airdrop of token based on how many points you've accumulated. And then, going forward, token will be allocated basically following the points of. Them. So just like you earn points today, you can think about earning tokens in the future, just like you earn points today. So So, so the point system is kind of becoming the new payout system, but we're like slowly migrating to it over the next four months. So, so it's a good time to join, because not only will you earn USDC today, but you'll also earn points. And then, you know, when we launch the token, you'll be earning token as and we're going to change the payout to daily instead of weekly. So expect by the end of the year that you'll be getting paid out in token. And then also the payouts will happen every day, which I think that'll be, that'll be really good for everyone, because you'll get paid more frequently.

Moderator  1:10:45  
Really amazing. And I'm looking forward to all of these stepping stones that you guys actually have installed for you guys for the coming few months this year and years to come from that. And also be expecting some of those details that you are supposed to send into whisper. We'll have it posted up on the comment section, so for any other person who might have questions related to that, we'll also check on from there. Thank you very much. And DIBELS, I hope that answers your questions. We'll just get one more question. We'll run out of time, so we'll just get one more question from prime, and we'll call it a day. Hi prime. I hope you're having a lovely day. So far, the mic is yours.

Speaker 3  1:11:31  
Thanks a lot. Brien, can you hear me clearly? Thank

Moderator  1:11:34  
you.

Speaker 3  1:11:38  
I love your whole idea, and it's working, heights functions. It's cool, but I got two questions, one in regards to your answer to response question earlier, you making a balance between the older network version and the new versions. Now my idea is, or my reasoning, if you maintain a balance between both, what are your security measures? Because keeping the older version is more susceptible to, you know, hackings and Trojan horses and all that stuff, therefore affecting your own network. So if you're going to be keeping these two How are you planning on bridging or making your security quite effective to counteract any issues that come along? And that is one. Then secondly, new crypto users, startups every day know their new coins coming into the market now. How can these new users or new coin owners partner with your VPN or with your company to get theirs ready? You know, yeah, with your network to come into the market

Brien Colwell  1:13:02  
awesome, great, great questions. So the first question, even though we're using older protocols like HTTP, one and DNS, we're still using TLS, modern TLS, with those protocols. So we're always focused on using modern TLS encryption, but we're using older protocols with modern encryption, and so that's, that's what I meant by sort of trying to find a balance. Is like, for example, if we're using DNS, that's a that's like a very old protocol, but we can still, we can still embed modern TLS inside of DNS. So that's, that's the kind of balance we're trying to find, is we're always going to be using modern, you know, bug free TLS. So, so that's a that's like, a given with our network, is we're not using insecure, older versions of TLS. We're always so, so we're built using go, and the Go programming language has its own TLS stack it uses, and we're using the Go stack TLS stack. So it's a it's its own version of TLS. It's its own and it's maintained very well, so we're always using the latest version of the Go TLS stack. So, so that's what I meant, and thanks for asking that question. I think that was a really, really really good question, but we're using the latest TLS with the older protocols. So to the question of the coins, yeah, I'd love to, I mean, I'd love to work with as many communities as we can. Like I said, the reason we chose Solana was very pragmatic and practical, and we're really excited to see where like Solana mobile goes. I would say, like, you know, where we want to go as a company is we, you know, like I said, we see a world where we connect data to services, maybe in. New Way. And we, you know, we see a world where, you know, computing can be done more privately. And, you know, I'd love to work with projects that are, you know, in the space, or, you know, trying new ways of of doing computing and and that goes for also non crypto projects as well, like we're, you know, we're currently looking at open WRT, the open source routing platform, as something we're trying to integrate with. We're also looking at projects like X ray and v less as as projects that we'd like to integrate with as well. So, yeah, I think generally, if there are projects out there that are working in the privacy, availability, security space, I would love to work with those projects and and figure out how we can work together. I think it's, it's a case where I do think working together, you end up with a better result, because, you know, like, if you look at our app, we speak many protocols, we integrate with many, many different systems. And I think I would just like to continue adding more protocols to the app. So yeah, would love to work with other projects.

Speaker 3  1:16:08  
Thank you very much. Well, answered, well, I love to see how your program unfolds and partake in it you're doing well, thanks a lot. You

Moderator  1:16:26  
you very much prime for thank you for for your questions. Brian, you um, so I think this is where we draw a quarter into our session for today. It's been really, really amazing. It's been lovely. I love the questions coming in from the community. I also love the detailed answer that you were given to each of their questions today. Brien, it was really, really amazing. I loved it. Thank you so much. If there's anything that we might not have touched on or talked about during the session, and you think that we might have missed it, maybe you could actually give us a few final words before we drop out for today.

Brien Colwell  1:17:16  
Sure, so I'll post the video and the PDF we're working on to the telegram. And then, yeah, we, we, we chat in discord. So if anyone wants to join our Discord, we'd love to continue the conversation in discord. It's discord.gg/your. Network. Just one word, you are network. And then also, please follow us on x at Yo, underscore, you are underscore network and yeah, yeah. Thank you everyone. And the biggest compliment and help, besides being here and giving your time today and I thank everyone for your time, is using the network and giving us feedback, we're trying to build a product that works for everyone, and so, yeah, any feedback you can give me is greatly appreciated, and I thank you very much.

Moderator  1:18:16  
Thank you so much, Brien for those wonderful and amazing ones. We really do appreciate and to community. Thank you too for joining us today for an AMS session here again on the portfolio gems. I know each and every one of you have your very busy schedule, and I'm really, really appreciate your taking your time to join us and on to see again, I want to say a big thank you to you all, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night, everybody. Thank you. Applause.

