Moderator  0:02  
Welcome everybody. We are so happy to have you guys here with us today. We have a really great project here with us. You are network Brien here is here to talk about his awesome project. So we do hope that you guys pay really great attention so that we would be able to get out all the main points about his projects. Brien, it's nice to have you here with us today. How's it going?

Brien Colwell  0:33  
Hey, it's going. It's going. Okay. Super busy over here, and I'm really sorry about the mix up earlier today, we're just, we're really flying, we're getting a lot of traffic on the network, and there's just a lot of a lot of activity right now. And so I apologize for for messing up the times on our earlier call, but thanks for having me back and and letting me present right now. So I really thank you for the opportunity

Speaker 1  1:02  
that's all right. That's all right. But as long as you're here now we can begin, yeah, so just to get down to business, can you just give us a little bit of introduction about yourself, some kind of like background and basically your experience so far in the crypto screen. Your your role in the you are network?

Brien Colwell  1:27  
Yeah, so. So I think what's really interesting about how we came about and how we got into crypto is that we did not as a project, set out to be a crypto project. We set out to be the best VPN in the world. So we wanted to go head to head and be better than the current generation of consumer VPN. We had a lot of issues with the way the current generation of VPNs work, we have issues with the transparency, the fact that overall, they aren't run as like open source protocols. Instead, they're run as sort of closed server, centralized services that are more about privacy or trust than true privacy. We felt like it was time that VPN should actually have hard privacy, sort of mathematically, statistically hard privacy. We felt that there should be greater transparency in the space, and we felt that ultimately, VPN should be something that everyone can contribute to and benefit from. And the reason that we felt that the current generation of VPNs was sort of, you know, getting old. And if you look at today, like the biggest consumer VPN today were built started, you know, 10 to 15 years ago. So it's sort of like, you know, we're currently kind of using an older, an older model, right? And we felt like the use cases are changing, the requirements are changing, and we and we needed a fundamentally different model that could adapt to the newer situations that and the newer needs that people have with their networks. And so if we kind of back up and look at what VPNs do, is they're solving really three, three needs, the needs of privacy, security and availability. Just to summarize, like really briefly, what these three needs are, is privacy, is the ability to be anonymous or to to hide your identity so that you know you can you can't be profiled, or, for example, a profile of you can't be created, you can't be tracked, etc. Security is is, you know, basically being able to guard your information so that you can you only share it with the parties you want to share it with. So that's, you know, like the services you connect to should be the only, only parties who see your information. And then availability is actually a really interesting one, because it's not really articulated much in the VPN space, but it's a key part of the VPN, which is the ability of you to connect to the services that you want to use. And there's really kind of two parts of availability. One is how you connect from your device to the VPN service, and then one's how the VPN service connects to the internet. And there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with availability. So for example, there's regional issues where different protocols are sort of blocked by local firewalls and local rules. There's also issues where different internet services filter traffic from VPN. So for example, if you're using VPN, you might not be able to watch a video or use an app because somehow you've been excluded from using those apps. And so we felt like we were seeing things, you know on the internet sort of play out in that VPNs were set up in this sort of adversarial where. Role where, you know, there were constant like, internet wasn't working, internet wasn't available. Privacy wasn't true. Privacy, it was all sort of this trust based model. Security, even was, you know, a lot of VPNs are using what's becoming more and more as non standard security, which is like we believe the standard security is the open IETF, TLS, Transport Layer Security. It's the same security that the web uses. So it's like the s and HTTPS. It's the most implemented trusted security model. It's also the security model that has a roadmap to address issues like availability with encrypted Client Hello, as well as post quantum, quantum encryption. So it has real, real roadmaps and real multi team efforts to test and improve. And we felt like, overall, like as a security model, we think that TLS is probably the right security model to trust, especially end to end encrypted traffic via TLS. And we felt like a lot of VPNs were sort of, you know, going different directions, using a lot of custom stuff, using protocols that were maybe, you know, even though they're open source, you know, less standard, less well understood. And so, so, we had a lot of issues. And I think generally, we also had issues with the perception that VPNs are some kind of, like dark product that you know only, like, you know, the gray or dark, dark web use cases use VPNs. We actually had a more fundamental issue that we feel VPN should be normalized, that VPNs are completely, you know, legitimate use cases of the internet. We feel that privacy and security and availability are legitimate use cases of the internet. There's nothing shady about a VPN. And I think, you know, we kind of are on a mission to really understand why VPNs had had these connotations, right? Like, somehow, like, if you're using a VPN, you have, you know, something to hide, or something and so, so that's kind of where we started. We kind of just jumped into the space and thought, okay, the current generation has a lot of issues. It has a lot of question marks. It actually might be dated as well, like, for example, like regulation changes around, you know, liability laws of centralized VPNs might mean that, you know, over time, centralized VPNs just stop working or aren't, aren't available in certain locations, even, like advanced countries. And we felt like it was time to explore a model that was, you know, resilient to these larger macro changes as well as these, like questions. And so that's really what, what inspired us to get going with your network is, you know, we felt like there was a solution that was transparent, that was available, that had hard privacy, that had the right security that was completely legitimate, meaning it was, you know, compliant with local regulations. We felt like it could be integrated and used as a as a, as you would expect, a security product could be trusted and used, meaning, like most of the time, security is completely open source and audited, you know, top to bottom, there aren't, like, hidden pieces of the security stack. And so that's kind of what we felt like a VPN should be, as it should be, a private, available, secure network that was, you know, completely usable and auditable by everyone and and so that's gonna, that's where we started, right? And so to kind of bring it back to the question of, you know, okay, so that's where we started. How did we end up in crypto is, you know, we basically realized as part of this journey that we were building what's called deep in technology. And by everyone here is familiar with deep end, which is decentralized physical infrastructure. But the idea is that, you know, it's really a flywheel that aligns a massively decentralized network with increasing value and increasing revenue opportunity, the more people join and participate in the network. And so, you know, what we kind of realized is like, wow, like, imagine us building a VPN network that had millions of nodes instead of 1000s of nodes. What would that do for privacy? What would that do for availability? And we felt like, like it was the future, like, essentially, if the ratio of users to nodes on the network was really low, you know, it would basically be impossible to differentiate VPN users from just normal users in their houses. Additionally, if the number of nodes is really high and we could distribute the traffic amongst a bunch of nodes, it would be like really impossible to correlate traffic with users, and hence, we could actually achieve what we. You would consider to be hard privacy on the network, meaning all your data wouldn't be going through like a single hop or a single node, right? It would be sort of spread out among many, many different nodes on the network. It'd be hard to trace a single user, you know, across so many nodes. And so, you know, we really felt like, okay, like this deep, in flywheel, where as the more users join the network, the value of the product gets, gets better, like the the network gets better, and also we get more more revenue opportunities. And everyone can can basically share in those revenue opportunities by essentially a token model. We felt like this is a like this project was actually a really good fit for for this flywheel and so, so that's what we've been pursuing. You know, starting this year, is we're basically transitioning our project from an airdrop model, where we would AirDrop

incentive pool to participants. It's what we call our original economic model, which is basically we would AirDrop basically a portion of our revenue to all of our participants. We're transitioning from that model to a token model. And a token model is really kind of a shared ownership model. It's more of a commodity model, where anyone can plug in and create value on the network. Just by participating in network, you're creating additional value, and everyone can earn based on the value they're getting. And I think most importantly, the more people who join the network, the more opportunity there is to basically build revenue from the network. So you can imagine a network that's worldwide that has a million nodes, could there's a lot of opportunity, and I'm happy to talk about all the business development to basically go out and sort of replace the existing VPN infrastructure with this new infrastructure, and there's a lot of opportunity to drive new use cases and content and communications, browsing, AI agents, AI generally, using this type of network. And so we feel like, you know, from a user perspective and a participant perspective, making it really easy for people to use and participate in the network creates a lot of opportunity to create additional value from that network, or sort of realize additional value from that network. And that's, that's the journey that we're on right now is basically building the world's largest, most private, secure and available VPN, and then, you know, working on various partnerships to bring value into different markets using that network. Yeah, great, great intro question. Thank you.

Speaker 1  13:01  
That's really great. So moving on. Can you just tell us more about the you know, the technology behind all of this? What was how you know, you guys ensure privacy, why using peer to peer bandwidth, and tell us about the risks. You know, are you guys liable for someone else's internet activity as a provider?

Brien Colwell  13:30  
Yeah, yeah. So I want to touch on three aspects here. So the first aspect of why do we use peer to peer? It's actually an opportunity to align the cost of the system with with generating a greater value. So by using a bunch of egress nodes that we don't control, we are actually able to create a higher quality network, meaning we're able to create a lower ratio of participants user. So hence, I mean using your network is like, almost like visiting a friend's house and sitting on their couch and using the Wi Fi in their house, right? Like, everything just works. Or, like, going to an Airbnb somewhere in the world, like you show up and and then you use the internet and everything just works, right? Like you can watch the local sports, you can watch the local shows, all that stuff, right? And so that that's the that's the power of peer to peer is like, we can create a lot of little houses that people can share, and that means that it's like, really hard to basically block or filter, you know, those houses, right? And so the other benefit is that it is that it keeps our costs low. So most VPNs have a scaling where, the more users they get, they have to spend more, you know, basically a linear, proportional amount of cost. So if you add 1000 more units, you have to add 1000 more capacity. You know, it's like basically a linear scaling model. Our model. More fixed costs, and that's great. So the more users we add, our costs actually get divided. And so why that's really great, and why that's really good for the user as well as for us as a company, is we can actually give a free vpn that's, like, much better than than, you know, really any other free vpn you can get, so, like, you can get, like, really good access to all the nodes. You can get, like, a really nice free balance every day. Because essentially, our costs are are fixed, right? Like, we don't, we don't have additional costs to support a user when users join, because that that cost is, you know, peer to peer, right? And so there's a lot of really good stuff with with peer to peer in that it lets us build a better product, and it lets us offer the product at a better price to users, and it lowers our our operating costs, and so we can basically translate that to users to give them better free product. So, so that's why peer to peer, the question of safety, and like, our technology is one of our key tenets of our technology is safety. And so I want to, I want to talk about this a little bit because, like I said, we're on sort of a mission to normalize VPN. We believe the use case of privacy security availability is a legitimate use case. We believe that, you know, everyone should have access to that type of network, and that it's not a it's not anything illegitimate. And so to back that claim up is like, we have to make sure that you know, the the actions and behaviors on the network are are legitimate, right? Like, we don't want file sharing on the network. We don't want botnets, we don't want hackers. We don't, you know, and if you think from the providers perspective, meaning, like, what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a lot of nodes, and with a lot of nodes, like, we see this great benefit right, from a provider's perspective, it's really hard to be a provider if there's a risk right to participating. And so we feel like making the network safe, making the network legitimate, shutting down bad behavior on the network, is like a fundamental goal and a fundamental technology that we build. So we actually dedicate a lot of effort. We run a security program with like, a smart firewall on every single node on the network, as well as all the users of the network. And so we our model is that we are, whenever we know that there's bad behavior happening on the network, we actually, instead of going and logging and like, like, reactively, like, doing something to, like, I don't know, kick someone off the network or something. What we do is we actually encode those rules or sort of those bad behaviors, right? There's a, there's an algorithmic encoding of that bad behavior into our security program, which is all open source, right? Everything we do is open source and and and then that that program basically proactively stops that behavior in the future. It doesn't report the behavior, it doesn't do anything, it just stops it. And so what's really great about this approach is that when you're using the network, you can be confident that you're doing everything you can to shut down bad behavior, because you're running this program, right? Like every node on the network is running this program, and so you are actively stopping bad behavior. And if something happens, you can, basically, we have a process where you can notify the company, we will, you know, update the program to fix the bad behavior, etc, right? So you can see how you know, this program is accumulating defenses as we go right? It's getting stronger. It's like an immune system that's getting stronger. And so that's our that's our model. And I think that's a that's contrasting to many other VPNs which sort of have this idea that you can do anything you want on the network, right? And I think, and I think that was a kind of a fundamental realization we had, which is, we cannot scale this network. We can't make it so that we have millions of participants if we don't make it super safe or for users. So it has to be super safe and and so, so we put a lot of effort into that. The other sort of, you know, pinnacle of our company is ease of use. We feel like the product should be usable by anyone, so we make a lot of effort not to be like a crypto product. Or, you know, users don't have to know anything about crypto. We're just a very simple consumer freemium product. And, you know, we try to address the entire audience of VPN users, which is over a billion users around the world, and and just make a product that, you know, everyone can use, and just super simple to use. And so a lot of the intelligence and, like, you know, decision making and stuff, we try to automate in the product, and we try to make it just as simple to use and and the product. If it's like under the hood, is trying to do as much intelligence as it can. So, so I want to talk a little bit about the intelligence that we do under the hood, and how we and how we make decisions to make to give users a reliable, available, fast internet, you know, from from our decentralized network and so. So I want to start by saying that there's, there are hard trade offs right in every system, and for us, we have always prioritized quality, availability and privacy over performance. So we've always said, Look, if we, if we had to choose, we would rather have a network that's private, available and and, and then a network that's performant and so. So if you look at sort of how we approach the network, we've approached it from a perspective of distributing the traffic as much as possible. Now, we've spent a lot of effort in the last couple of months of actually also addressing the performance issue. And I'm really happy to report every release we've had has made substantial improvements to performance, to the fact of like, the average route now on the network is above 80 megabit, and so we're really happy about that, but, but what we've done, and I want to talk about the technology, is that instead of having a single client to server model, so you can imagine, like the simplest possible VPN, is I put a VPN server on a CDN edge, and I have a client that connects to the VPN server and it just sends data to this VPN edge, or CDN edge, and the CDN edge egress, is it? So that's like, really fast, like, and like, anyone can do that. It's like, I could do that in like five minutes. But that's like, really bad for privacy and availability, right? So you can see that's kind of the trade off in in our model. Instead, what we focused on is, how can we use these, you know, potentially millions of nodes around the world, and create a four nines, reliable internet connection from those nodes that is truly private? And so what we came down to is, is a model that basically is a marketplace. We call it our auction model, where for every single connection that that you make, and if you look at a website under the hood of a website, um,

there are, like, many, like dozens of connections. So like, if you open up Chrome Developer Tools and load a website and then look at what they call the waterfall model is, you'll see, like, there's a ton of network connections under the hood of a of a single website. So you're loading images, you're loading web page, you know, HTML, you're loving loading JavaScript, you're communicating with APIs, right? There's tons of servers. And so each of those network connections in our model, in our auction place model, is we actually run an optimistic auction for each of those connections, where we actually go out and ask up to 12 separate providers to basically try to make that connection. And the client chooses the provider that is able to make the connection, a correct connection, well formed to the target server the fastest. And so what's really awesome about the auction model is that we can basically show that as you add more providers, the user's experience of the network actually gets strictly faster and strictly more reliable. And so that's like a really cool property of the way that we do networking, which is that by just simply adding more nodes, we are able to deliver a faster and more reliable connection consistently to the user. Because what happens is the most reliable nodes basically surface up to the top, the fastest nodes surface up to the top. And what we expect to do, and how we think about all of our network is as as basically an incentive model, where where nodes are incentivized to be fast and be reliable and also agree with the user security preferences, so that, basically, when a user runs an auction, the best nodes win the auction, and hence they get more rewards and More earnings. And so what's really cool about our network stack is that we run this auction model. We also do a multi hop network stack where the the providers are at least three hops, meaning there's the user, the clients, there's another hop, and then there's a provider. And this is the same, sort of rule that Tor uses, but essentially the idea is that the providers will never know the IP, the real IP information of the users, and we do the same thing with all the metadata and the protocol information is that the protocol metadata is also anonymized, so that it's really hard to statistically know for. For a provider all the like, who's sending the data? They're seeing a lot of data coming through their node, but, but, but, but they can't, they can't put it together into a profile or or create a profile of any individual user. And so that's, that's what we consider hard privacy. We also take the step in our in our architecture of assuming that providers, or sort of the nodes, are nefarious. We, we do not trust providers in our network. So, so we our model is a model of mutual incentive, meaning it It benefits providers, assuming providers want to earn or want to get traffic. Basically, that's the same thing as earning is getting traffic. Assuming providers want to get traffic, it benefits providers to agree with the security rules, because when I said, we run the security program on both the providers and the clients, if either side detects the other side isn't following the same rules. What actually happens is that the protocol prevents those two parties from talking to each other for a while. So basically, we have a disconnect model, whereas if two sides disagree on the rules, we disconnect them and we force them to sort of talk to other people, right? So you can see all that model very simply, creates an incentive where, if you want to have conversations, if you want to route traffic, you need to agree on the rules. Otherwise, you're going to basically, you know, you're not going to get a lot of traffic. Additionally, what we do is, if you look at the internet, there's a set of older protocols which are unencrypted. These are like the old Internet, and there's a set of newer protocols which are encrypted. So there's an older protocol, like HTTP is an older protocol, HTTPS is a newer protocol, right? So HTTPS is end and encrypted, just like there's an older protocol called DNS, which is the domain name resolution service, there's a newer protocol called DNS over HTTPS, or D, O, H, and so what we do is we, we basically force all of the traffic on our network to use the modern end to end encrypted protocols, meaning the providers and the nodes cannot see the data at all, or they can only see what is exposed, generally on the internet, which is, You know, in TLS, there's still a tiny amount of information exposed that is trying to be fixed, which is the server name, but the, you know, most of the information is basically encrypted end to end, encrypted through the providers. And so that protects the providers, it protects the users. And I think generally, this model is really good, which is we, we have a aligned incentive model where we do not trust the providers, because we force end to end encryption through the network, because we turn off the old internet protocols, or we seamlessly upgrade the old protocols to the newer protocols. And overall, this system creates a by using our auction model, it creates an overall reliable and available network. So that gives you, it gives you network that's local, that works. It's reliable, meaning, like you can get a connection that works to pretty much any server at any time and and that's fundamentally our technology, we've kind of, you know, completely upended the traditional client server model. And we've gone, we've gone in a different direction where every user has multiple IP addresses, every user is basically running a an auction network stack. That is, you know, it's a different model than the traditional client server model. And so we feel like this is a pretty, pretty awesome, pretty awesome model, because it aligns all of the incentives to create, to create a fast, available network. And that's ultimately what we think. You know, the job of the protocol is, is to create the right incentives so that people who follow the rules are incentivized to do the right behavior. And you know, by basically breaking the protocol as you you know, you don't, you don't earn and so that that's overall what we're, you know, what we're really focused on with our protocol? Yeah, great questions. Yeah.

Speaker 1  29:24  
A great luck the way all we, you guys set it up, really shows that, especially the incentive structure, shows that you want guys to do what they want. You know, just not, not just for the incentives, right? So moving on, can you tell us some of the major milestones and upcoming updates for the next six to 12 months that you guys have for us that you guys are planning to put into our. Sure.

Brien Colwell  30:01  
Yeah, great question. So I wanted to take the opportunity and shout out that the apps are available in the iOS App Store as well as the Android Play Store, as well as open source F droid, as well as the Solana D app store for Solana mobile phones, as well as directly from GitHub. So we distribute our app in a lot of different places. We've actually been live for over a year, so we've been running a production network, you know, for over a year, and we've been learning and releasing continuously based on feedback and optimization. So every every release has slowly gotten faster, more reliable, better. We invite everyone to download the app. It's just view our network and and please give us feedback. And so our Discord is a great place to give us feedback. I'd just love to plug the discord, which is HTTPS discord.gg/you, are network and, yeah. So at this moment, almost half of our roadmap comes from user feedback. And so there's a lot of stuff we do every release. We try to get released out every two weeks to address, you know, performance, to address common issues that users are having, but we're also following the general, overall product development cycle, where we've been really focusing on a couple things in the last last month, and we're just kind of wrapping up kind of that sprint, but we've been focusing on statistics, getting more statistics about the network to users, which is improving our APIs around statistics and exposing more statistics in the app. We've been focused on performance. We've been making some major tweaks to both performance and availability. We've introduced in the latest release two new transport protocols, and we've done a ton of optimizations. Actually, the product is about three times faster in the latest release than it was a month ago. So we're super happy about that. We've also been focused on advancing our earnings a model towards a token. So like I said, we started out with USCC airdrops just this week, in this release, we're super excited to announce what we call phase two, which is USCC airdrops plus token points. So it's points that that we anticipate will convert to a substantial amount of token once the token becomes available. So I want to speak about the token a little bit. So we're doing the token maybe a little bit differently than some projects. So we are not selling token. We want our token to be a commodity that represents value that the community creates. So the community will own half the token supply. And what that means is the way to earn token, and the way to get token is basically to participate in the product, meaning by, you know, using the product basically. And you know, you can basically use the product and participate in the product from our apps. We have also other command line programs and sort of power user programs where you can participate. But you know, anyone can participate in the product just by using the apps. And that's something that's like unique, somewhat unique to us and maybe unique to us. I don't see a lot of deep end projects that let you use and participate from the app, but for us, that was super important is you can be both a user and a participant directly from from our app, and people can use the app to actually, you know, get a lot of rewards and earnings. So so we're just about to enter phase two of the project. What you'll expect to see in the next couple months is we're going to be working on more options and more sort of power user features around providing as well as we're changing the earnings model a little bit to focus on not only earnings based on how much data you're routing. But also what we're doing is we're adding a baseline earning as well, so that anyone, anywhere in the world, just by having a unique IP address on the network that's available, can have some earnings. And so we think that that's like a really important change in our network, because we do. We do recognize that having a baseline capacity, especially in you know, every country, is like a really important thing. So, so there's a lot of provider and earnings changes that we have on the roadmap for the next release. We. Also will be continuing to improve statistics in the app. There's a we're still working on a number of statistics that we're trying to improve the app. And then what you look what you should expect to see after we kind of achieve all of our statistics and and sort of provider and earnings changes that we anticipate is you, were basically looking forward to our token launch, and so towards the end of the year, we will be launching a token on Solana blockchain. The token will at that point, all of the earnings of the network will switch to token, and the token there will also be staking models where you we're essentially taking some inspiration from prediction markets around capacity planning and reliability. So you'll be able to basically bet on the network for capacity and reliability. So you can actually kind of predict where capacity should be. You can predict what you know, where reliability should be, and you can actually earn just by staking the network. And so we think that's going to be a really cool way that we can actually guide growth of the network, is through our staking model. And that will be like, very interactive and statistical. And we're looking forward to more partnerships. And so, you know, basically, we feel like launching the token is just the beginning of the journey, which is, you know, we really view the network as a protocol that can be white labeled, it can be adapted into different use cases. It can be it can create Win, win situations for many different industries. So any product that embeds a VPN, we feel like we have a we have a better value proposition. Any AI agent, we feel like we have a value proposition. We feel like we have a value proposition for content owners, because we bring basically more users to the content. We are like, we're not a piracy network. We actually bring more users to the market, which is really cool. I think it's like, you know, we can basically increase market sizes for existing distribution channels, which is, I think, really valuable for a lot of content producers and content owners. We feel like any communication app or telecom use case, we have, we have a we have a value add. And so I think what you're going to see from us towards the end of the year is, not only will we be will we bring our token, launching our token, and switching our protocol over to the token, and it's a great opportunity for people to participate, because the participants of the network are the ones who own the most token, like more than anyone else. So you know, over half of the the tokens applies going to the participants is not being sold. It is not, you know, the only way to earn it is by participating. But we feel like we're going to be driving real revenue opportunity from from this network. And we're really excited, you know? We're really excited to see where the network goes at the end of the year. So, yeah, we're basically just getting ready for that moment. We've been having a lot of scaling opportunities and testing our scale up until then. I just like over the weekend, we had a lot of users come in from the Middle East. We actually had a huge surge, like huge surge, and we were one of the only VPNs that actually worked in the Middle East over the weekend, which speaks to our availability model and our general architecture is that, you know, we, we not only maintain service, but we are, we are still running, we are active. We have good we have good performance. And so I think, you know, we've been getting a lot of growth and testing through the weekend and and, yeah, we're really looking forward to continuing to continuing to scale the network. We want to get to a million active users as soon as possible, hopefully by the end of the year. And yeah, we're really excited. We also have a we're really looking forward to the Solana mobile launch coming up in August. We've been doing a lot of work with the Solana mobile team. We have actually a promotion going on right now with Solana mobile. So anyone who you know, pre order to Solana mobile, or any users of the saga, the Solana saga, we've actually, we're native on the Solana D App Store, and we have, you know, we put a lot of effort to make sure that our app is both a great VPN but also a great way to earn on the Solana mobile phone. So you can actually just leave it on in the background all the background all the time, and your phone's just gonna be earning you, you know, token in the background. So it's a great, great use case if you have a Solana mobile phone. And we're really, you know, we're really looking forward to the secret launch in a couple of months. So that's just kind of a, I guess, a preview of what's coming. But yeah, we're really excited about everything coming this year, including the release that is going out this week. So this week is the start of our Phase Two earnings campaign. Just to reiterate, so we're really excited about

Speaker 1  39:54  
that great question. Yeah, thank you so much. I do think that. I think that. Saw some hands earlier. Do you think it's time for us to take some community questions? Or you still have

Brien Colwell  40:07  
definitely? Yeah, yeah, of course, I'd love to

Speaker 1  40:13  
Yeah. I think I saw some hands earlier raised, but yeah, you guys could just stop your questions in the in the DMS, or, you know, could just raise your hand. I see some hands. I see go yeah goats, go ahead with your question.

Speaker 2  40:34  
You okay? Hearing Yep, yeah, go ahead. What's your top priority for 2025 and, um, can you and your team members share a bit about the strategy that will implement in the nearest future, like, um, what makes the team, um, feel confident to win in the long run?

Brien Colwell  41:00  
Yeah, great question. We've been doing a lot of soul searching on that question, so it's kind of a nice stop, you know, timely question. So, so we want this, like we think we're building the next generation of network. We think that over time, you're going to see the centralized model basically fail. And we, you know, we want to be there when it fails. Like, you know, that's kind of overall, you know, what we think is gonna be happening in the next 10 years is, one by one, you're gonna see centralized VPNs be blocked, or, you know, regulated, or whatever, right? And so, like, everything we're doing is to be a legitimate alternative that is deeply embedded with, you know, legitimate companies. And, you know, we don't that. That's our overall, like, macro vision. And so what are we doing to get there, right? So, yeah, that's, that's what we're talking about this year. And so, you know, beyond like, token launch and the products, we're really excited about the product updates. I think, you know, we have a really aggressive product roadmap, and I think you're going to see a lot of really cool updates as we go. Like I said, every two weeks, you know, we're launching something good, but there's sort of like a bigger, I guess, soul searching moment where, you know, we have to, we have to go and, you know, really start to try to find, like Win Win scenarios where we can basically embed our network into existing. Opportunities, either by replacing or creating new opportunity, and and show that our network is actually, you know, delivering more value to, you know, partners. And so I think you know what we're doing right now, and I'm confident we have a number of scenarios that are very concrete, where you could take what a company is doing today, and you could replace it with your network, and the company would save money and give their users the better product. And additionally, additionally that they might actually make, they might actually make revenue. Because what we're doing, we're a mutual, you know, we're an infrastructure where anyone who's a user is also participant. So there's a case where you might be able to replace what you're currently doing and not only give your users a better product, but you actually might make revenue. And so, so we're really excited to kind of continue to explore, you know, those Win Win scenarios with various players. I think this is a really interesting time for VPNs, because you can there's a lot of users. Like I said, there's over a billion users of consumer VPNs around the world. There are also a lot of products that integrate VPNs today. So you see a lot of like free VPNs, VPN partnerships across many, many different products, like whether we're talking about telcos, mobile phones, whether we're talking about content providers, whether we're talking about browsers, whether we're talking about AI tools, right? You can see, like VPNs integrated into a lot of these different products, and for us, we think that we think we have a very competitive product, which is, you know, because we're building a whole new model of VPN. And so we're actually going to start being more aggressive with our our partnerships and our integrations, you know, starting, you know, pretty much now and and, and and so we're really looking forward to bringing on some really awesome partners as well this year. And so, you know, not only are we looking forward to great product innovation and our token, but we're also looking forward to, you know, really proving out our model, that what we're building is creating creating more value for partners, and that, I think that's. Is that's going to be our, our flywheel, right? I think, I think we have the opportunity to really create the most value from our network, and that's what we're that's what we're going to be chasing. Yeah, great question.

Unknown Speaker  45:15  
All right, thanks for the great answers you.

Speaker 1  45:27  
I yeah for sure. For sure. Thank you so much for the questions. Really appreciate it. I think I got a question in the DM from Johnny. Johnny says, what strategies are used to balance network load across providers, especially when many are low bandwidth.

Brien Colwell  45:51  
Yeah, so I mentioned our auction model, right? So that fundamental auction process aligns provider performance with who gets to route the traffic. And so you can imagine, like, okay, we're doing an auction, and there's like, 12 providers, and one is like, like eight of them are slow, and then like, four of them are like faster, like the four faster ones are going to win the auction, like, pretty much every time. And then there's going to be a scenario where, like, they win so much that they're like, inundated with traffic, right? They're like, they're like, overloaded, because they're winning all the time. And then some of the traffic is going to start spilling over to the slower nodes, right? Because the popular nodes are going to be the fast nodes, is what I meant to say are going to be, you know, getting slower, right? The more traffic they're taking on. And so we think our Oxford model is like a pretty cool model, because it's self, it kind of self heals and self selects performance. And that's, that's what we see, both theoretically, but also in practice. And so, you know, when you think about your network, you have to kind of go away from thinking about the traditional client server, where there's a client that connects to one server, and you might get a bad server that that's not our model at all. Our model is like you're continually evaluating different different providers, and the fastest provider always wins. And so you know that that's a pretty self healing, self balancing, self balancing model. And so we feel pretty we feel pretty good about that model. I also, I also want to say, like every user has a different set of 12 providers, and so, like me as a user, I get one sample. It's almost like I reached into a gumball machine or or a bag of marbles, and they pull 12 marbles, right? Another user is going to pull a different 12 marbles. And so that you know that distribution, that marketplace mechanic of, how do we give 1212, 12 providers to a user? That's also what we do, is we make sure that every user gets, like, a really nice sampling of providers, so they don't not you don't get the same IP, you don't get the same location, you get a nice diversity of providers. That's, that's what we focus on. So, great question, and we think our, our fundamental approach is, you know, is well suited to handle this at scale. So we're really happy with the approach. Yeah,

Speaker 1  48:23  
yeah, that's a little bit, I think Jenny got the answer to his question, but I think that that's all we're going to be able to take for today. But Brien, I believe that you had a great time talking about your project, URL, network, you know, getting to take some questions from the community,

Brien Colwell  48:44  
absolutely, yeah, I really thank everyone here for your time, and you know, I apologize for the mix up today. I really value the feedback from everyone, and I just want to plug again that you can download the app today, we are live. We've been live for over a year at App Store, Play Store, F droid, as well as our GitHub, which is you, our network. The greatest compliment we can receive is if you try the app and give us your feedback. You know, whether it's good or bad, we love your feedback. We are trying to build a product that works for you, that because that is how we're all going to get better, right, like, if we can solve the use cases of everyone around the world. And we really like to hear about all the, you know, the feedback from everyone around the world. We think, you know, we think we're it's helping us build, build the best VPN. And so thank you very much for the opportunity. And I hope, I hope you can join discord if you want to chat more. And would love to, would love to keep chatting on the discord, which is HTTPS discord.gg/your, network. And, yeah, thank you very much for the opportunity.

Speaker 1  49:55  
It's a pleasure to have you here today. We think the awesome community. For staying out through and listening despite the little glitch at the start, really appreciate you guys tuning in. It's bye for now, guys, and we'll see you guys next time. Stay safe. Guys. Great.

Brien Colwell  50:13  
Thank you. Thank you very much. You.

