Moderator  0:00  
Okay, hello, everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world, I am your host today, Ellen MOX, and today we have with us a very special project. Your network is the name, and we have with us its CEO and project lead, Mister Brien Colwell, so, um, it's a very interesting project, because it's not just a normal token that you want to buy for quick profits. This is an actual utility that has a good um, that has a good use case in the real world. So yeah, um, good day. Mr. Brian, I would love to, you know, hear more from you. Give us a brief introduction about yourself, you know, how did you come into this piece? And, yeah, we can go into the project from

Brien Colwell  0:53  
here. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me today. Excited to present the project to everyone out there. We're based in Bay Area, San Francisco, California, but we are a global team. We have team members all over the United States, as well as in Japan. So and our users come from everywhere in the world. So first and foremost, before I jump in, I would invite everyone to check out our app. So we are building the best free VPN. That's our mission. You can find our app on the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. Just search for your network. It's just view our network. Check it out. We appreciate all feedback, and so I'll just jump into what we're up to. So we started as a product company, so we actually came around into the space a little bit differently than many crypto projects. We set out on a mission to build the best VPN. We saw a number of issues with existing consumer VPNs that we wanted to address, and so we spent we started in 2023 and we spent the first year of the company really kind of building the foundation for what we think will be the best VPN, and so we've done things differently than other VPNs, and I'll love to jump into all the technical details and project details of what we're doing differently, but we took a real contrarian view to how to build a VPN across many different areas of privacy, security and availability, we looked at what was currently the best practice, and we re evaluated it from the ground up to deliver the best possible product to users. And so as a company, we're obsessed with giving our users a VPN that just works everywhere in the world, gives them hard privacy and gives them the best security, and also does this with absolute transparency. And so just a few really high level items that you'll see with our VPN is that we are open source, both on the client and the server, so you can see all the code that's running in the VPN, both you can see it on the client side, but also the server side. We've been audited to the highest levels of user privacy, and we will continue to build our project with with the most privacy and security minds. And so I will, I'll go into a lot of the details about how we make that work, but, yeah, I'll turn it over to the moderator and and I'll let you direct the conversation from here.

Moderator  3:53  
Absolutely great introduction, and I love the fact he talked on, you know, the VPN, the innovation. So I think we'll go deep into that, because I also wanted to hear more about how the privacy looks like, you know, what countries it would be available. So, yeah, um, let's, let's go deep into the VPN right now. And, um, kindly give us a overview on, you know, the privacy, the cost, the current innovation, and yeah, I will be asking more questions as we move along.

Brien Colwell  4:30  
Awesome. Okay, great. So, so we looked at what current VPNs were doing in terms of number of servers, and we saw current VPNs and CDNs were tapping out around in the order of 1000s of servers, somewhere between two and 6000 servers. Of course, the fewer servers you had have. That means the fewer routes your data travels and and hence, uh. The more opportunity there is to sort of monitor your data. We, as we re evaluated building a VPN, we wanted to look at increasing the number of server counts by at least two orders of magnitude. So instead of having 1000s of servers, we wanted to aim for millions of servers, and so that's a that's a very different type of network than what has been built so far. So if you look at consumer VPNs today, which the largest ones have 1000s of servers, they're basically run as these central companies, where you have one company that's setting up data centers all over the world, or points of presence all over the world with ISP relationships. And these points of presence are routing data for user but it's basically you have one, one company setting all this up, and sort of, you know, paying all of these locations. To keep this capacity running, the way that we saw moving beyond 1000s of points of presence to millions, is actually to decentralize the network. So instead of one company running the network, the network would have to become more of a community resource where various people can plug in as they have capacity and help scale the network. And so thinking about the VPN as a community resource where various anyone can basically plug in and contribute raises a couple of really profound and fundamental questions about how to build the network there, there are two real questions. One is, how can we make the network reliable and fast and performance when basically, it's built by random devices that are plugging into it? And so we needed to kind of re evaluate the VPN protocol and the client server model, and I'll go into how we did that. The second major question that we saw was, how can we make it safe for people to plug in and participate? So basically, the internet is regulated and and has, you know, there are rules and laws everywhere in the world, and so how can we run a legitimate project that follows those rules without compromising user privacy? And so, so we've been working on, again, a unique approach to the space and that dimension. So I'll just kind of start from the top on our two kind of biggest areas that we've we've been innovating. So on the protocol side, we've kind of up defined server model. So instead of on our network, instead of having your device connect to a single server. What we do is instead connect your device to many providers at the same time. We call this our marketplace or auction model. So for every single connection you make to the network, we actually evaluate a number of participants, or we call them providers, to see how they can route that connection. And so you can imagine, if you load a website under the hood of that website, there's a bunch of images and resources and APIs being called, and each of those is communicating with potentially different servers. So it's not uncommon, when you load a website to communicate with dozens or more of servers to get all the resources for that website on our network. What happens is, each of those connections, each of those servers, gets evaluated

Moderator  8:57  
against a

Brien Colwell  8:59  
number of providers. Typically, a user has four to 12 providers, and the user chooses for each of the connections, which which of the providers is providing the best quality of connection, or the fastest connection, the connection that actually connects and works. So there's a lot of different factors that go into choosing the best one, but on our network, we focused on making this process of choosing providers per connection very fast and efficient, and what we've been able to do is actually build build our network so that we can have many providers at the same time without the user even noticing or without there being a performance impact. And so we do our auction optimistically, where the user gets a strictly better connection than if, if you just connected to a single a single provider, single server. And so what's really great about that is, as we add more providers to the network, what we we've done with our auction models. Actually work out a way so that the more providers there are, the better your connection actually gets, and the faster your connection gets, because we're able to optimize every single connection to find the best possible performance for that server that's being communicated with, so or the content that's being loaded so, so that's that was a really key innovation that we made, we kind of went a completely different direction than the traditional client server model, and we went into this multi IP model where every client has many IPs. And this is also not only good for performance and reliability, but it's really good for privacy, because in our network, your data is spread out across many different providers, and so there's not a single node that's seeing all of your data. And so that's really great, because it's, it's as as we increase the provider count, we're giving users this sort of statistically hard critique that any one node is only going to see a small fraction of their traffic. The other aspect that we really focused on with our network is the actual end to end encryption of the communication itself. So we wanted our network to only handle encrypted traffic and then encrypted traffic. We didn't want to put any unencrypted data on the network. So this is a bit of a challenge, because if you look at the internet today, there are older internet protocols that are unencrypted, that are still being used widely, and then there are newer internet protocols which are end to end encrypted, but they haven't been sort of, you know, completely replacing the older protocols and so on our network, what we focus on is turning off the older protocols, or seamlessly upgrading the older protocols to the newer protocols, so that we can be sure that all of the traffic or network is end to end encrypted. And so what's really great about that is, as a user, you can be confident that no node on the network can actually see the unencrypted traffic. You know, every node is basically just seeing the to the best standard available today, we use a standard called TLS, Transport Layer Security. It's what the web uses, but to the best standard of the web, that's what every provider is seeing in terms of the traffic flowing through the network, and also it protects the providers. Also, providers basically just want to route encrypted data. Nobody really should want to see the traffic going through the network, and that just keeps everyone safe. And I'm going to go into our second aspect of safety. So so there's a lot of good behavior that happens on a network like ours. So we provide ability for privacy, security availability. We help people use the internet anonymously. We help people give them, you know, better security on their devices, and we help them access the internet in cases where the internet, you know, would other otherwise not work correctly. And there's a lot of you know, legitimate cases, like if you're traveling, if you're you know, if you're using services, you know, on the go, etc. And so we focus our network on servicing those, those use cases. We think those use cases are use cases that everyone, everyone needs in the world. Actually, there are over a billion VPN users around the world, consumer VPN users. And so we think that there's, you know, a huge demand for just high quality, private, secure, available network. However, there are also use cases that, while that, while users might like them are really bad for participant work. And so there are certain use cases where if those use cases went unchecked on the network, it would make it very hard for people to participate in the network, and that would mean that the network could not scale to millions of nodes. And so you see, like many networks in this space, many consumer networks, sort of, kind of, you know, are able to operate only in certain regions, because, essentially, you know, there are certain regions that are more permissive than others. Our model is we want to be in every region. So we want to be everywhere in the world. We want to connect people just like you can physically travel around the world. We want to make that same magic happen through connecting internet. And so in order for us to make that happen, we have to have a particular focus on safety for our participants. So what that means? Is we have a zero logs policy, so we do not data. And so there's a bit of a conundrum, right? If you don't log data, how can you make sure the network is safe? And so what we've done is that we've actually built out a program, which is an automated security program where we encode all of the rules about what we think is safe and correct on the network into a program, and this is all open source. This program runs on the provider nodes as well as the client nodes, and basically checks to see if behavior is happening that would cause trouble for participants, and if it does, it just silently shuts down that behavior. So it doesn't log the behavior, it doesn't do anything, it just silently shuts down the behavior and and so so we think this is a pretty fair approach to to the network. Basically everyone on our network can be confident that they are doing their best effort to shut down bad behavior. If there is an issue, we have a dedicated to evolving the security program and and adding new intelligence to the program. So so this is kind of how we run the network, is instead of logging or, you know, reactively looking at issues. We instead build all of the detection and mitigation of bad behavior into an automated program that runs on every node, and this program maintains privacy of all users, but also maintain safety for participating. And so these are some real key differences in how we build our network and why we think we're positioned to scale to millions of nodes, and we're positioned to be, to be a great consumer VPN, like we're building something that's never been built before at this scale, and we think that at at sufficient scale, this will just be a network, just an order of Magni to better than VPNs for privacy, availability and security, just because of how it's built. And so that's, that's the mission we're on right now.

Moderator  17:22  
Okay, great stuff. Great stuff. Um, I do. I did want to know, how do you guys actually vet in the independent providers to make sure there isn't any malicious activity on the on the Yeah, on the server,

Brien Colwell  17:41  
yeah, yeah, we actually assume providers are malicious. So that that's our that's our general stance of the network is. We do not, in any way assume a provider is, is not nefarious. Now, so if you look at how the protocol works, there's, it's very it's a very defensive protocol, meaning the security rules are validated by the the you user and the provider. So for example, if the user thinks they're using one set of rules, but the provider is using a different set of rules, what we do is we just kind of disconnect the user from that provider. So so the user goes and finds a different provider, and so, kind of, at a fundamental level, the protocol makes sure that the users and the providers are on the same page with what the rules are. We have a, what we call a dispute mechanism, where if the providers and the users think they're, for example, they're using the network differently. We have an automated mechanism that sort of determines sort of the right outcome. But the general determination is, if a provider and a user disagree, they just stop talking to each other, and then the user goes and finds another provider. So what's really great about this model where, essentially, you know if there, if there are disagreements, and we do the users and providers do regular checkpoints to see if they agree. It's like, every 32 megabytes, they checkpoint each other to make sure that they're on the same page and they agree on the rules and everything. So what's great about this model is it encourages good providers. So, and that's generally how we've looked at our network, is we don't we, we don't do any vetting to like like vet providers, but we want to create incentive model that encourages good providers. And so because of the model where, for example, if a user or a provider detect bad behavior, they sort of disconnect immediately. This means that the good providers, or providers that agree with users actually end up getting most of traffic. And so what's great about that model is the users who get most of the traffic get get the most earnings, the most rewards. Rewards. And so we think that that sort of creates a, you know, the right incentive structure, basically, for providers and users to agree and, like, work together, and then also that drives rewards for the providers. And so, yeah, we've kind of looked at this very economically in terms of creating the right incentive structure, because, you know, fundamentally, we don't think it's possible to vet or trust providers in a network like this. All we can do is create the right incentive model for them to sort of agree with users, and then we can also set up hard security so that users data is not in any way compromised. It's just a matter of, will the provider route the data, the encrypted data, or or will the, you know, will the quality of service be at the right level? That's the kind of the question that we've put for the providers. Yeah. Great question.

Moderator  21:00  
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Um, and great answer, I think, is a great system you've put in place. And, um, yeah, makes sense to, um, go through that route. Um, I did. I did have a concern. I wanted to know, um, the in the countries available right now, is it, um, worldwide, is are there any restrictions to countries here?

Brien Colwell  21:28  
So we we released the app in a number of ways. So we released it through the Play Store, which is the Android, Google Play Store. We release it through the Apple App Store, and in those in those stores, because we're a US company, obviously we cannot target certain regions. It's just, you know, as a US company, we can't we also release because we're an open source app, we release it on open source distributions as well. So we released to a platform called F droid on Android. And this is a reproducible open source platform pretty much available to anyone who can download source code. And so because of the nature of open source, we just put it out there. We don't actually target any countries with our open source. And so you know, any one's free to basically download our open source. We also distribute it on GitHub. So you know, basically anyone can who can reach GitHub can download our app. And and. So, yeah, we have users from all over the world. We, as a company, are, you know, focused on basically giving the great, best VPN to all of our users. We we don't really look at where users are from, but we focus on just giving the best quality of experience everywhere, and so we do a lot so, so one thing that's that's, like, really interesting is, when you, like, run, run like a global like overlay network, like us, you see a lot of differences in internet around the world. So different, you know, there are different challenges in connecting to the internet from different regions of the world, and so we do a lot to to help users connect in different different region. The reason we do this is we think it's aligned with privacy and security, you know. We think, basically, you know, having encrypted data is, like, you know, is a right that that we're trying to, you know, embody in our app. And so generally, we think that, you know, anywhere where data is sort of being manipulated, we can, we can help users encrypt that data better, so that it's not manipulated. And and that's sort of, as a company, that's kind of what we're focused on, is that that core privacy and security use case for all of our users,

Moderator  24:07  
I think, for a for a company like yourself, that is definitely a major core value to, you know, want to uphold, you know, the privacy it gives you more credibility, and gives the company more credibility, for sure. So yeah, thanks for the answers, and that actually makes sense. I can see some questions coming in from this, and they are really making sense. But before we go there, I have a few more of mine, then we can take theirs. So my question. I wanted to know, so providers actually earn money from the project. So I wanted to know, are there any factors that influences the payouts of these for these providers, or is it limited to location? Limited to time for the payout here. So do run a stream?

Brien Colwell  25:05  
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so, so, so, basically, we're, we have, like a phase, an earning phases that we're going through right now. So, so I mentioned we started this project without any, without any crypto, or really anything, we just wanted to build a great project, and sort of the way is by using a decentralized network, you know, basically as a VPN, we could be spending money on we could be spending money on servers, or we could go and build a protocol that worked better than those servers and sort of tapped into existing capacity so that we could deliver, like a better value at a comparable cost. And so, you know, basically we had like, two levers, right? Like, we could deliver a cheaper service at a cheaper cost, or we could deliver a better service at a comparable cost. And so we felt like, instead of us as a company going and, like, putting a bunch of servers around the world, we could, like, build this protocol and at the same cost, you know, at the same cost of goods sold, from a business perspective, we could actually deliver, like, a higher quality network and so, so that was kind of the premise of the company, is, like, basically, you know, we started it with the belief that there's a good business to build for consumer VPNs. I mean, like I mentioned, there's billions, like over a billion users. And I'm just talking about the consumer side. There's a lot of interact, interesting activity happening on on the developer and and business side as well. But just on the consumer side, there's over a billion active users. We think, you know, there's, there's a, there's a nice market here that we thought we could make a dent in and so, so we thought, okay, like, this is a way we could just build a legitimate business right in the space, by just giving building a fundamentally better, better VPN. And so that's going to how the rewards, you know, makes made sense to us. Is like, basically, you know, at sufficient cash flow or sufficient user scale, we would, you know, we'd have a nice business with with a nice cogs, we've kind of evolved in terms of how we think about the earnings. So think that, you know, basically we think is really useful with digital token, is the incentive creating the right incentives so that we can align people to contribute now, to create like more value in the future. I think that that's really unique to how tokens work, especially, you know, limited fixed supply tokens is we think that demand for this type of resource that we're building is only going up in time. And so we think that, you know, by sort of focusing the energy of the community to build a great network sooner and more quickly, we can actually, we can actually capture that value sooner. And so that's something I think a token kind of uniquely helps us do is helps us basically, you know, bring the network to the right capacity and scale sooner. And so that's something that we didn't fully appreciate when we started. You know, the role that the token could play as an incentive structure so that, you know, fairly compensated for helping us, you know, scale this novel network. The other aspects of the token that we didn't, I guess we didn't fully realize when we started the project, but we're working on now are the ability of the token to predict some of the really hard pieces of information that are that affect the network quality, and so the two pieces of information that are really hard to predict in networks is capacity and reliability. So most networks end up just over allocating on capacity, because they have no idea where people want to use the network or where at any time the network is going to be used. And so we think a token can actually uniquely help with that. It creates a kind of a prediction market for capacity. And we think that that's that's really interesting and also useful for people to help us predict where capacity should be. You know, just like we're seeing prediction markets, you know, expose a lot of useful information about the world. We think capacity is one of those areas where the token can can help expose really useful information about capacity of the network, like where people want capacity, where, you know, people want reliable capacity, and so so that that's that's something that we also didn't. Really appreciate so, so we're on kind of a journey now where we basically have a couple of different phases of the project. We're on phase one, we're just about to launch phase two. Phase two is basically a points, a points campaign. So we're going to, we're going to continue doing our USCC air drops, but then we're also going to do points. So, you know, basically every time you earn USDC, you're going to get a share of a fixed amount of points every month. And then we're also launching a referral campaign. And so the referral campaign is pretty cool, because we realize there are different ways to contribute to the network. You can obviously run providers, and that that should and will, and our intent is that the providers lets you basically participate in a valuable like distributed data center that's providing real value to the world. And so we believe that participating should always be compensated fairly. But also, there are other roles about growing the network and raising awareness of the network that that we didn't fully appreciate or or value with our original compensation model. And so what we've done is we, in this next phase earning, we've actually added a referral system where you can, you can, basically, like, earn pretty good income just by referring networks, because it's a recursive referral system. And also, if you join the network from a referral, you can actually share in the revenue of the person who referred you, which is pretty cool. So basically, we can start to create communities that work together to basically to grow the network. And so we think, we think our models fundamentally, the the more people participate, the more value we can deliver. And hence, you know, the pie gets bigger. Like, fundamentally, we think we're growing the pipe, and so the more people we have participating, you know, we think we're just building a better network. And I think you can, everyone can, like, imagine a world where, like, what if we were, like, the number one VPN in the world, right? Like, there would be, like, real revenue and real, you know, real opportunity to partner with projects and browsers and and AI agents and everything. And that's kind of the world we're aiming for, right? So we see, like, the pie getting bigger as we grow the network. And that's, you know, that's really what we're trying to do here, is, you know, we're not trying to, like, subdivide a small pie. We're trying to grow a big pie where everyone's, everyone's part of it. Yeah? Great questions.

Moderator  32:29  
Yeah. Great stuff. Great stuff. Love the vision. So, um, that lead, it leads me to my next question, though, which was, um, how does your network tie into crypto because, um, you are on crypto and you are marketing in the crypto space. So, um, as of right now, I'm not sure you have a token. So do you plan on launching a token? Or, yeah, how does it, um, tie into the crypto space, and how do crypto users actually, you know, use it.

Brien Colwell  33:01  
Yeah, yeah. So we are launching a token. So we are, like I said, we're in, we're in a phased earning phases right now. We have our USCC AirDrop. Today, we're about to enter phase two, which is USCC AirDrop plus points campaign. And then phase three is the the ultimate phase where we're moving towards, and we expect that to happen towards the end of the year, where we are going to convert the points to an airdrop of our token, and then we're going to move all of the operation of the network to token, so that basically all of the incentive earnings of the network are paid out in a token. And so we think that this is good for everyone, because essentially, you're going to be building something of value that has a limited ownership stake, and then you're also going to be or a limited supply, I should say, and then we're also going to be building something that, over time, becomes more valuable. Because I think if you can, you can imagine that the demand for private, secure, available internet is just going to be going up over time. This is something, you know, I mean, if you just look at the amount of data being transferred on the internet is going exponentially, and so we think if we can basically, you know, assign a value to the traffic that's on the network, whether it's through consumer free mail model, or whether it's through B to B enterprise contracts to use the network, You know, we think we can capture like, real value with this network. And so what's really great about the token is it lets people, sort of, you know, contribute early and get, like, a pretty large stake in the network. You know, as we as we grow value over time. And so we do plan on launching our token later this year. Year. And the the intent is that the points people have starting we actually were back. We're back dating the points to May, but the points people have starting in May will air, will convert to a significant air drop of the token on day one. Our goal with our token is a fair launch, so the community will own half of the token supply, and we are not pre selling any of the token. And so, so basically this, this is the token that really is about when you participate and help grow the product and make the product better, you earn token and and we think that this is delivering real value with the token, like, we think this is a, this is like a 50 Year, 100 year project where, you know, if you can imagine, in third layers, us having, like, millions of nodes and being this, like super reliable VPN, I think what you'll see is like, there's, there's not going to be another way to build a VPN like this will be the VPN that everyone uses. And so that's kind of the vision that we're, you know, we're working on together.

Moderator  36:13  
Brilliant, brilliant. I think it's a brilliant system you've actually put So to clarify, you aren't pre selling the token, but, um, can only be end when you work to grow the project in the work to support the community, if that's correct,

Brien Colwell  36:31  
that's right, that's right, that's right. And yeah, we have a real ownership idea, which is the community that participates should be the one that that benefits from the from the demand of the network. So as demand goes up, you know, people who own the token should, should benefit from that, just like any commodity,

Moderator  36:51  
absolutely like the fact you treat like a commodity. So I can see the vision here. I can see it lasting a long time. It's actually pretty sustainable, she asked me, and it's more as you have if a team of marketers that you aren't really paying directly. So I think is a great system, for sure. Great system.

Brien Colwell  37:16  
I just want to plug.

Moderator  37:19  
Yeah, you want to see before we jump.

Brien Colwell  37:21  
Oh, yes, I'm so sorry to interrupt, but before we jump into to more questions, I see there's a lot on the list. If everyone just wants to download the app and and use it, yeah. I mean, we try to focus on just having a real product that works, and we're on a, you know, bi weekly release cadence, so just using the app and giving us feedback is huge, huge, hugely valuable to us, as well as participating. So I just want to kind of plug the app again, just try it out and let us know how it works. So, yeah, thanks. Back over to you and excited for the questions.

Moderator  37:53  
Yeah, absolutely do well to download the app. You know, if you have any questions, they are on Discord and, um, their team is very active on Discord as well, so they will get back to you if you have any questions and any feedback for them. So yeah, um, let's take some community questions. I can see some from the comments, and they are really good questions. So the first comes from John week. He says, How many active nodes are needed to reliably protect users from traffic analysis, and where does your network currently stand for this? Yeah, yeah.

Brien Colwell  38:37  
So this is a question where more is better. So So one thing that you'll see us doing, and I'll answer your question directly in a minute, I'll just, I'll give you a number, or I'll attempt to, but I want to just answer it. Also, from an incentive perspective, the harder you make it to participate. You raise the bar so that only a certain type of participant can can run the network. And I think tour is kind of at that level where I have immense respect for tour, and I think that, you know, I think I'm a tour user, and they're a huge, obviously, a huge innovation and but I think because it is so risky to run a tour node, they make it so that only a certain type of user can run a tour node, and that type of user is a user who sometimes is above the law, right? So basically, you have a lot of users who are, you know, maybe not the right users you want to see, all the traffic running, running the nodes. And that's, that's something that we were, like, really concerned about with this project, is we wanted to make it easier, like, much easier, to participate, but we could have. A diversity of users running for nodes. And so basically, our vision is that like anyone with a phone could run a node. And so so anyone who just had a phone or their primary phone or extra phone could participate, and it would be safe to participate. And so we would have a much more diverse group of people participating, we would just have normal people participating. So normal people generally just don't have the incentive to, like, you know, monitor traffic or scrape traffic, right? And so that was like, a really important thing for us to say, like, we want to make this so much easier to participate, so that we can get, like, a more diverse group of participants. And so that was, like, really important to us, and that that will continue to be part of our mission to to have a diverse group of participants. So kind of back to the quantitatively active node count. So we follow the same multi hop approach as Tor. We always have, at least so the the providers never see the users from an IP perspective, that's super important to us. We're continually rotating metadata on the network. So we if, if you look at how the clients work, they are continually rotating their IDs, or the, you know, the ancillary IDs, or the metadata on the network, so that it's really hard to track from a protocol perspective a single client over time, because a single client, like I said, has many IPs, but they also have, like, many ancillary IPs, so they have even more, like, Internal metadata to spread the traffic around. And so typically, what we look we target is at least 30 providers in any one location. We think at 30 we see, generally, like a pretty steady, great quality of service. But like, if there's a if there's a country with fewer than 30 we look at, we look at, we want to get that up to 30. And so that's kind of like how we've thought about, like we're thinking about, how can we incentivize a baseline capacity so that we can have at least 30 providers in every single country? And so, yeah, if we, if we wanted to set a number, 30 is kind of our number. Like, if we get 30 providers, we feel like that region is pretty resilient, that that basically we're we have a pretty good quality of service. But as we grow like of course, We'll reevaluate that. But at this stage of the company, 30 is sort of where we aim for and we have many countries that are over 30, but we also have many countries that are under 30, so So at this point, we're just trying to get every, every country in the world, up to 30.

Moderator  42:51  
Great answer. So, um, that's 30 for your question, John week, and yeah, thanks for your question. So I'm going to the next question. I'm gonna take a couple. I think they are very important questions as well. I can tell everyone is listening. So yeah. Jerry says, In jurisdictions with gag orders, how effective can a warrant Canary truly be? Could suppression of that Canary itself expose users.

Brien Colwell  43:25  
Yeah, so, I mean, that's why we're I mean, we're going to hold ourselves in a country that that has a precedent. So our entity today is home the United States, where we're Delaware corporation, but headquartered in California, and a Warren canary is established and legal in the United States. So there's, as far as I'm aware, a Warrens Canary has never been gagged, and I believe that's been defended as a legal precedent, of course, like our home jurisdiction is like us, right? Like we think the US is sufficiently good for now, but we're also looking for a token to basically create a Swiss foundation and run the token from a Swiss Foundation. And so we think that that would be better than the United States for a number of reasons, and but, but, yeah, I think, I think this is a key challenge of where you locate the controls of the company. I mean, today the controls of the company are in the United States. We are actively anticipating moving the foundation and sort of the controller protocol to Switzerland, but, but yeah? I mean, it's a really good question, but my answer is, I do I believe a Warren canary is sufficient for the current operations of the company, given that we are our US company today.

Moderator  44:59  
I. Okay, yeah, I understand that according to your jurisdiction, if you would like for a breakdown on that question, Jerry, do well to join their discord. I'm sure they would love to chat with you. Okay, um, we have another one from finest car fan. Sorry from pronouncing your name wrong. So he says, or could volatile crypto transaction fees or flop 20 token values lead to unpredictable or unfair income for providers undermining trust and adoption?

Brien Colwell  45:37  
Yeah, yeah. We thought all about this a lot. So as a as the foundation and a company like we obviously don't want to get caught between some kind of spread, between the token and US dollars, as the company, we plan to do business in US dollars. So you can look at all of our like consumer products are sold in dollars or or local currency equivalents, like Fiat as a, as a, b to b. Company, we plan to do contracts and dollars or local equivalents. So, so we plan to basically peg dollars as income. And so you can think of it like, like, fundamentally, the unit we're selling is capacity on the network. And we're selling, like, a certain amount of capacity for a certain amount of dollars, and we're translating that to token to basically, you know, use the network, right? Like the network works in token. So we have to basically, like, buy tokens, use the network. And so that process of buying token at market price to use the network is happening like we anticipate that that's that process can be happening a lot, which is like, you know, users pay us in dollars. We have to, we have to give the users access to network. Hence, we have to back those dollars up or convert them to token. And the way we've thought about it is, instead of obviously trying to carry some like fixed token to gigabyte count in our network or token to dollar, we're actually using it's going to create more of a whenever a user uses the network, we're going to do a conversion at that point, and it's going to kind of lock in a certain amount of token at that rate. And so it is going to create fluctuation in terms of, you know, there might be like a gigabyte of data today that that creates like a certain amount of token payout, and tomorrow, that same gigabyte would have a different amount of token payout. But we think that by fundamentally running the business in dollars, is that the dollar equivalent payout will be relatively steady, and so that's that's something that we're kind of like, wanted to guess bias for is like the token, the token amount might be like, fluctuating a lot over time in terms of payouts, but the dollar equivalent should be like, hopefully, steadily going up, and so that that's really what we focused on with our with our tokenomics, is kind of pegging, pegging the business to dollar, and then working from there to the token but yeah, we'll be releasing our white paper soon, but you'll see kind of how we thought about the business from, you know, basically based in the business in dollars and and we think that that makes total sense for users. Because as much as we think that that token makes sense for the infrastructure and for power users, the normal user just is, like, doesn't really know how to use a token, and so by, by basically just integrating with local payment systems, which are the local Fiat systems, we think we can service like many more users. So, so we're pretty committed to having a business that runs in in local currency. Yeah, I hope that answered the question. But if it didn't, would love to keep chatting on Discord.

Moderator  49:02  
Absolutely, I would like to, you know, appreciate you for, you know, knowing your field, because there's a very sensitive field, appear to know a whole lot about it, which is very needed. So yeah, I appreciate you on that. So, um, I, I hope that answers your question, and um, they will be accepting local, local, um, currencies too. So, um, yeah, that makes sense. I will take one last question, and we will have to call it today. So the question goes from Leo, what technical measures are in place to prevent meta data leakage, for example, usage patterns or connection logs, when providers are decentralized individuals rather than centralized service, rather than a centralized service? Yeah, I hope that question was um. Clear,

Brien Colwell  50:00  
yeah, yeah, it is. So, yeah, great question. And I see a number of questions too that we won't get to. But I really hope people join the discord and we can chat about them. And I'll, I'll throw link again. But so, okay, so we at a at a core level, require IP anonymity on the network. So just like Tor has three hops, we will never connect a user to a provider in fewer than three hops. So that is like number one. So you can think of that as basically meaning providers, yes, providers see metadata, but at a very basic level, they don't know what IP is sending that data. And so that that's really important, obviously you can have multiple providers conspiring to suss that out, and we can talk about that. But you know, because we're a randomized network, we think that, you know, we try to make it hard to predict the route through the network. You know, that that's generally how we approach that. So on the second level, so I mentioned that there's older internet protocols that are unencrypted, and there are new internet protocols that are encrypted. The internet is evolving. The internet is is trying to fix itself. So if you look at, for example, the web standard TLS, it still leaks a little bit of data. There's a there's a piece of data on every encrypted connection called the server name, which leaks out, and so the IETF is trying to fix that with the thing called encrypted client. Hello, but, but this is just the current state of the web. Basically, the web is, you know, has really, really robust encryption standards, but because of how the web works, you know, ever like, there is a tiny amount of information that leaks on every single connection, and that's just because the decision was made to support scale and load balancing on the web. To do it that way, every VPN has the same issue, whether it was one VPN or another, the VPN server is always going to see this metadata. And so, so we're very conscious of that. Like we we are following the IETF of how we can, like fast track encrypted client. Hello, for our users. We don't have a solution to that yet, but, but generally, our answer is that we force all of the data to be encrypted to the current best quality of web encryption. So you know, we don't we don't allow unencrypted DNS, we don't allow unencrypted HTTP. We force all those connections to be encrypted. So the amount of data that a node can actually sniff out on the network is actually very small, and so, so that's something like, we're obviously, like, trying to basically make that zero over time. But it's like, today we're at the best quality web standards, and it's very small. And so, yeah, over time. I mean, those are the two knobs we're going to be we're going to be playing with is we want to make sure that the IP is anonymized that you know from an IP perspective, people don't know who's using the network. We want to make sure, from a metadata perspective, that we're cycling and anonymizing the metadata so all the ancillary IDs and internal IDs, if you look at how the client works, is continually psyching cycling its internal IDs like IPv six does. And we also want to make sure that the actual encrypted traffic, the ended encrypted traffic on the network, gets to a point where it's exposing zero metadata, and so we're going to be working with ITF on encrypted client. Hello. We're also looking at the the emerging post quantum standards. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot that's happening in encryption that and web encryption that, that we're trying to, you know, really fast track adoption into our network. So, so we're looking at how we can do that for our users. I hope that was a good answer, but we'd love to chat more in discord.

Moderator  54:21  
Yeah, love the answer. So that will be the end of to today's questions. For anyone who has further questions. Do all to join their discord. It will be a great conversation there as well. So I appreciate you for your time. Brien, and I really do love the project, and love the fact that you take the user safety into great consideration. So it shows you aren't just here to make some quick bucks, but you know, to actually help users and innovate the. Um, you know, the VPN space. So, um, I love that, and I hope everyone here had and enjoyed the presentation. So, um, if you have any final words to give before we, you know, wrap up the events, please do and, yeah, we can call you today.

Brien Colwell  55:20  
Thanks for the kind words. That's how we see it, too. We think we're building a like a 50, 100 year project here. We think we've already made pretty, pretty amazing innovations to the VPN space with how we do our connection marketplace, how we do our safety program. These are new concepts. We're pioneering these concepts. But if you look at the bigger picture, um, nobody has built a network of millions of nodes that that just works well, and so that that's really what we're focused on in the next year, is getting to a million nodes proving that the decentralized VPN is going to be better than the centralized VPN we are. We're on that mission. I think, I think generally in crypto, you know, this whole space of D pen, decentralized infrastructure is so new, you know, it hasn't been proven right? It hasn't been proven that decentralized infrastructure is better than centralized infrastructure. And so our mission is to kind of, you know, be part of that, to show that there are these use cases where the digital token and the decentralization actually outperform the centralized model. And so, yeah, we, you know, everyone joining, giving us questions, you know, helping us work through these issues, that's, like, super valuable for us. And yeah, we're, we're, yeah, we're excited about, you know, where we're going. And, yeah, looking forward to all the feedback and and, yeah, the biggest compliment or help you can give us is just use the product and let us know if it works. Let us know if it doesn't work, that that's super valuable for us. Thank you. And thanks everyone for your time, of course. And first and foremost, you know thank you for your time and the opportunity to speak today. So thank you very much.

Moderator  57:01  
Absolutely great to have you. And yeah, I will send over the our team will send over the recording. I think you will need it, right?

Brien Colwell  57:14  
Yeah, please we posted on YouTube, or we transcribe it too.

Moderator  57:18  
So yeah, thank you very much. Have a good

Brien Colwell  57:23  
thank you. Applause.

