Moderator  0:02  
Um, hello, everyone. I'm gonna be the host for the me at Zion cows. So can you give us a brief introduction of the project? How, in fact, you came about the space, what inspired you? So, yeah, from there, we're gonna kick off the show. Curious,

Brien Colwell  0:23  
awesome, okay, can everyone see my video? I don't know if this is a video call or not. Can everyone hear me? Okay, yeah, okay, awesome, yeah, thanks for having me today. Excited to speak about the project called your network. Before I jump in, I invite everyone to check out the app. It's on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, as well as open source F droid. You can also get it from our GitHub repository as well. So the name of the app is your network spelled you are network. We started two years ago to build the best free VPN. So our vision was to completely reinvent, uh, how VPNs are built, so that we could offer a better product for users, and we can do it for free. And so we're on a mission to basically re evaluate every aspect of VPNs and come up with better solutions for users by building a new type of infrastructure. And so the three aspects of VPNs that we look at and that we're really concerned about are privacy, security and availability. And so I want to touch on, kind of briefly, what we're doing in each of those areas. So on the privacy side, we set out on a mission to build the largest infrastructure which will translate to privacy benefits. And so the reason that will happen is if you look at today how current consumer VPNs and CDNs are built is they have 1000s of edges. So the largest CDNs and consumer VPN today are in the order of mid 1000s to high 1000 number of points of presence. The reason that that is perhaps surprisingly low. We're talking about products that service millions and hundreds of millions of people. And the reason that those points of presence count are so low is that it's actually quite challenging to build out points of presence. You have to build on ISP relationships. You have to set up entities and regions. You have to build out operations structures in regions, and ultimately, you know, run a complete subdivision of your organization in that region. And so there's a lot that goes into that. And what, what it means, though, is by having only 1000 points of presence, all it becomes more of a trust issue. When we talk about privacy with the current generation of consumer VPNs and CDNs, we're really talking about trust, meaning you're trusting that these companies are indeed keeping your data private, but your data is flowing through these small number of servers in a way that would be very easy to track and log, etc, and so, you know, kind of an interesting fact that we saw when we started this is that not Only is, is the current generation built on what we'll call trust instead of privacy, but they're also, surprisingly mostly closed source, so there aren't many or any consumer VPNs that actually have a reproducible, open source supply chain where you can see all of The changes that are going into the server code. And so it creates kind of an interesting scenario where not only is it not sort of hard privacy from a statistical mathematical perspective, but it's not even hard privacy from an audibility perspective, meaning a third party could not independently audit the servers of most consumer VPNs and CDNs, because the supply chains are not open source and so or reproducible and so, what we saw as an opportunity here to think about the space just completely differently. Instead of having 1000s of A. Edges, points of presence. And I'm using the word edge and points of presence interchangeably, we thought of a scenario where we would have at least two orders of magnitude more, and so we would have millions. And at that order of magnitude, we also realized that the challenges would be about dealing with many more, less reliable and less homogenous points of presence. And so when you control everything about a points of presence, you can, for example, control a lot of you know, the redundancy and reliability aspects you can control speed and performance, aspects in terms of the capacity allocations, when you start going to millions of nodes, and especially turning from a centralized to a decentralized model, it becomes really about how we manage unreliable and heterogeneous performance and capacity at a massive scale. And so what you see is different nodes are have different levels of reliability and performance. And what that means is that the fundamental model of kind of one user connecting to one server is really just not scalable to a decentralized infrastructure, meaning it would be, like really, really precarious to connect a user to a single node, and that node, like would, for example, go offline every hour or something, that would be sort of a bad experience. It would not be the four, nine reliability experience that people expect from their networks. And so what we saw is as an opportunity, but also a challenge. So the opportunity of millions of nodes is that we can deliver true, hard privacy, meaning your data will not flow primarily through any central route. We can deliver true peer to peer routing through multiple hops, delivered to egress nodes that are controlled by various entities, right? So no single entity would control a majority or even a substantial amount of the nodes. And so what that means is there's no there's no single entity that would be able to reconstruct if we distributed traffic broadly enough the traffic profile of of an individual, and so what we think that that is is true anonymity that's hard privacy if, if no one can reconstruct your traffic and metadata that gives you a level of of Privacy that's just unattainable with the current generation of centralized VPNs and CDNs and so. So we thought that was really good. We thought, okay, millions of nodes could lead to a more private network, and that that's awesome for people who want privacy. And the challenge of that is that we are dealing with nodes that we don't control. We're dealing with nodes that have, you know, everything we talked about, in terms of reliability and performance. And so we had to evolve the protocol to deal with that. And so we are, I believe, the first network that is actually using a multi P protocol. So when you're connected to your network, you have several IP addresses at the same time, and we're routing data at the same time in parallel, through many, many different egress nodes at the same time. And so,

so that's our that's a fundamental innovation we've made. And the way it works is we have what we call an auction model. So the auction model races several connections against each other for every single connection you make. So if you look at a web page under the hood of a web page there, there are dozens of connections to content servers, APIs, web servers that that are made, and it's the same for apps as well. And each of those connections on your network is basically evaluated against up to 12 different providers, and the provider that can actually perform service the connection correctly, meaning it can actually make a connection and return data and do that the fastest is the provider that actually gets that connection. And so what's really great about our model is that the more providers there are, you can show that our model actually gets better as the number of providers goes up. Because what we're able to do is, without any performance impact to the user, we're able to choose the best of many providers. And so if you have 20 providers, we're going to give you a better a better connection, like mathematically, than if you had one provider. And so that's aligned with, you know, having a lot of different providers is we're able to basically, you know, sort through them and deliver the best provider for every single connection. We're also what's really great about our our approach is that it deals with the reality of the network, where you have different content available in different regions, and so even in a country, there might be different content available in different regions. And so because what we do is we basically ask every provider to prove that it can actually service the content correctly, meaning it won't be blocked, what you end up doing is connecting to providers for each flow that can actually route the data. And so for example, if you're trying to connect to one website, it might go through one area. If you're trying to connect to another website, it might go through a different area. And so that's a really great property of our kind of auction protocol, is that we're able to adapt to different dead zones and availability issues within the network and still maintain privacy and so, so that's what we're doing for privacy. I want to talk about availability too, because this is something that a lot of VPNs and CDNs don't really talk about, but it's a it's a really important aspect of the internet, which is the ability for the Internet to to just work. It's also sometimes called quality, which is, you want the internet to just work as if you were physically in that area. So you want the privacy and security of a massively decentralized system. But you also want an internet, internet that works right. It would be kind of bad if, for example, you know, you connected to the network, and then suddenly all the websites were like, Hey, you can't, you can't use this website anymore, because you're, you're using a VPN, right? And so, unfortunately, this happens a lot with with some networks, like, especially Tour, where, you know, various service providers have decided to just, you know, completely block, you know, that network, right? And so we wanted to build a network that used the power of of millions of nodes to actually make it so that, so that this couldn't happen, that we could scale to to the to the world. And it would be like very difficult for for the availability of that network to be, to be compromised. And so the way that we see availability is really at two levels. So it's from, from the user to the the cloud, or to, you know, the platform that's, that's, that's running the protocol, and then from the platform and the egress nodes to the services. And so there's really two hops there. They're vastly different in terms of technically, what's going on on each of those hops, like there's different challenges, but to a user, it looks like the same thing. For example, if I can't reach the VPN, it looks like the internet is broken, or if I can reach the VPN, but from the VPN to the services, the connection is not working. It also looks like the internet is broken. So both of those hops, the user sees the same outcome, which is the internet's just not working as I expected it to but, but we wanted to fundamentally the way we think about our project is a long term kind of rethinking of how VPNs are built, how overlay networks work. And we wanted to fundamentally address both of these issues. We felt like if we did not have a path or a real strategy to be available, then this project would not succeed. And so the way that we've really thought about availability from the user to the VPN service is by using many different protocols, and especially focusing on older web standard protocols and sort of older protocols, generally, and so we we use a lot of very basic web protocols so that our traffic looks just like a web browser. That's kind of our goal, actually, is to look just like a web browser. We don't want to look like a VPN or a specialized network. We just want to look like a normal web browser, and we also look at, sorry, I'm going super long, but I just want to say we also look at protocols that actually are underutilized, as well as fundamental to the internet. And so how can we repurpose so. Core protocols to to work this way. And so I just want to say one more thing before I hand it over, and thank you for letting me just give this this introduction, I want to say that we also focus heavily on user safety. So user safety is always been one of our two key pillars of our network, the first is ease of use, and the second is user safety. We do safety differently than than, I think probably any other network in that we actually build a safety program which is very similar to a smart firewall, and this is all open source that runs on every single node of the network, and its sole job is to stop internet traffic that would cause issues for participants. Stop it. It doesn't report it. It doesn't do anything with it. It just stops it. And so the goal there is to make it super easy and safe to participate in the network, so that basically you can you can participate without worrying that you know something bad is going to happen on your network. You can also participate knowing that you're doing your best effort to stop bad behavior on your network and comply with local laws. Because everything's encoded in a program, and this program is continually being improved. And I just want to stress the goal of the program is to basically allow the internet, to allow websites, to allow apps to work, but to shut down behavior that would get that would cause issues for providers in various regions. And so what you see on our network is the vast majority of apps and websites work. They work beautifully. Games, work, apps work, websites work, but certain things, like file sharing and like botnets and stuff don't work and so, so that's a really great I think innovation of our network is that, you know, we're doing this completely open source, like, there's nothing to hide. There's no no one's making, like, hidden decisions about the network, primarily our, our number one driver is to make it safe to participate in because, I mean, you can think about this if it's if it's hard to participate in the network, the amount of nodes won't grow, and the number of, You know, hard privacy and availability benefits that we get with more nodes won't happen. And so it has to be super easy to participate for us to actually grow the network. And so this security program is like a very key part of how we approach the network, how we how we operate. We put a lot of effort and emphasis into it, and and it's something that you know, in addition to the various protocol improvements, that that you know, everything we do is open source that we're, I think, contributing to the field, we're also contributing the security program. And so we think that any VPN that you know that wants to make it easier to participate, you know, could it could adopt a similar approach. And so this is, I think, a a big contribution that we're making to the space. And, yeah, I'm really excited for all the questions today. So thank you. Looking forward to questions.

Moderator  18:10  
Yeah, it's good to see that the project has a very wide range of features and a very unique one, yeah, because, like you said, projects also have difference, like several servers, which is offers to different users trying to use the VPN. It's a very unique approach there. So moving on to the next question, does your network promises to eliminate the need for VPNs? So how does the technology achieve this without compromising user privacy or safety?

Brien Colwell  18:49  
Yeah, yeah. Well, the way we look at is VPNs need to evolve. We think there are several macro themes that that are happening, which is, one is VPNs are becoming embedded, meaning many products are now embedding VPNs into the product. So so being able to to have the same privacy, availability, security benefits, but in a in a very versatile form factor, where you can embed it and you can reuse it. That's something that we're seeing happening in the VPN space, so that you know, like for example, users of many like privacy browsers have no idea that they're using a VPN, but they are. And the same is happening with AI tools and AI agents, etc. The other macro theme were happening is some of the protections that you might see with VPNs are being questioned. Meaning, you know, can a VPN in certain countries really, you know, allow all traffic to to be happen on the VPN, or is there some. The liability of that VPN, you know, for the traffic that's that's routed through the VPN, and so, so, so I think if you look at how we're positioned, we're positioned, I think, for the future. So we have real scalable answers to both of those questions and use cases as well as we have real, scalable technology that that advances privacy, security and availability, and so we think, like any technology, the VPNs of today are very much the product of 10 years, 10 to 15 years ago, meaning the current generation of VPNs they use today started, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, they've just been sort of slowly tweaked and grown over time. We think that there's a new generation of VPNs that meets these new use cases and these new challenges and macro themes, and we think your network represents the new generation of VPN. It's built with more nodes. It's built with bespoke protocols that are that are adapting to different network conditions. It's built with availability in mind. And it's built to be able to be embedded and reused across products, so that, as a developer, you can actually embed and use VPNs in your own products and so, so, so we think your network is really, you know, looking at the future of VPNs, and it's, you know, where, where, where the world is going. And we anticipate, in 10 years, you know, we we think more VPNs will look like, bring like your network, actually, you know, we hope that your network, in 10 years is what like one of the top VPs of the world, if not the number one VPN. And that's, that's kind of what we're aiming for.

Great questions, yeah,

Moderator  21:59  
it's good to see you guys are looking forward to making the project has a very strong security there, because most of the VPNs, they always come up with different things to, you know, stuff like that. Yeah,

Brien Colwell  22:17  
yeah. And I just want to emphasize that we're entirely open source. We have completed a masa l2 audit, which is one of Google's audits, where they verify that the code of the client actually does what it says it does. So they look at the privacy policy, they look at the encryption technology, they look at the implementation of the client to make sure it's not logging or, you know, capturing data it shouldn't be and they also, we've also published our pen test results, so you can go onto our doc site and see our recent pen test but we're very transparent about, you know, the code, auditing the code, our privacy policy is super minimal. I always find it's kind of interesting. If you read the privacy policy of a VPN and it says, like, you know, we can share your data with third parties, you kind of have to wonder what they're doing, right? And that if you look at our privacy policy, it's super minimal, you'll see it's very tight, it's very clear about what we do. And so, yeah, I think a lot of the things that that I think you look for, when you look for a privacy product, meaning it's open source, it's reproducible, its privacy policy is tight. You'll find that with our project, and that's something we really care about, right is we think that, you know, security should be done right? Like nobody trusts closed source security in this day and age, and we don't understand why people should treat VPNs any differently, like VPN should be open source and auditable and transparent, just like every other security technology.

Moderator  23:59  
Yeah, because what's the major thing here, where on the investors look at on projects like this with VPN, is the security aspects. Because the thing here is that everyone wants a very stable and private thing that can, you know, help the the things here, yeah, moving on to the next question, because the project has a very good, good privacy and security here, I myself will only use VPNs with good security that won't assess my private data. Yeah,

Brien Colwell  24:37  
yep. Okay, yeah. Great question. So for security, what we do is we, we use

Moderator  24:43  
brother. That's not the question. Okay. So the next question here is knowing the project claims to offer a true privacy here. So how does your network ensure verifiable user anonymity as both the 10. Technical and network levels. So just, I just want to know how the project ensure verifiable user unknown anonymity, where users are, you know, private, only a single face using the VPN.

Brien Colwell  25:15  
Yeah, yep. Okay, great question. So there's two things we focus on. So one, we're decentralized networks, so your data flows through a bunch of nodes that we don't control. We always focus on having at least three hops, so the user through an intermediary to the end, end result. It's a very similar idea as Tor, you know, really focusing on three hops at a minimum, because that means that the the the decentralized nodes don't see and don't know the true IP of or the true origin of the traffic. So that's really important. We, you know, we want to make sure that, if you're just a participant, we actually consider participants to be nefarious. Like, you know, we do not trust participants on our network, and so we've built our protocol around, you know, a mutually aligned to earn rewards, but it's it's not trust. So, for example, all of the incentive structure of our providers, is about incentivizing providers to agree with users, to basically agree on the same security rules, to agree on, you know, that they're routing traffic correctly, and then to protect users as like in every way from the providers and so like you know that that's basically the summary of our model. Is we want providers to agree with users, because fundamentally, if they agree, they can, they can earn more more income or more rewards, and and that's the basic incentive to agree, and then also to protect users from providers. And so the ways that we protect users from providers are by using at least three hops to protect IP, we also force end to end encrypted protocols over the network. And so you can think about the network as having an older the internet. I'm talking about the internet generally now as having a an older set of protocols, which are unencrypted, which are, you know, anyone can read and so, you know, in the, you know, in the traditional ISP world, that meant all the ISPs could read your data, but in the, in the decentralized world, an unencrypted protocol means anyone can read your data, who's participating in the protocol, right? And so what we've what we do on our network is we turn off the old internet protocols. We say no more, like, it's been long enough, like pretty much the newer end to encrypt. Protocols are supported everywhere, so we don't even need to go there. We don't need to enable these older protocols. Basically, there's no reason anyone should be using an older protocol, so we turn it off, and then we only allow the most modern end to end encrypted protocols to go over the network. So I'm talking about TLS, which is end to end encrypted. I'm talking about DNS over HTTPS, which is engine encrypted. And so, so these newer protocols basically protect users from providers. So it hides it makes sure that the providers only see encrypted data, and that the, you know, basically, the providers can't snoop on the users data, that the providers don't know the IP address of the users, but they also can't snoop on the data, and so that's really important. As we as as we grow, we are aligning with the IETF open standards around TLS, Transport Layer Security. So the IETF is, is an alternate standard from other VPN standards like wire guard or open VPN. TLS is what the web uses. So that's the s in HTTPS, et cetera. And so we're aligned with TLS encryption. We use TLS for all of our encryption. We use web standards for all of our transports. We're talking about HTTP, one, web sockets, web, RTC, HTTP, three quick, you know, these are all the standards that we use, and these are all TLS encryption standards. And what we think is really, really exciting about TLS is that, because it's being developed in the in the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, it's the, you know, the group of of engineers who basically define the reproducible standards of the internet. So you have multiple, you know, multiple implementations of the IETF standards. And so what we think is really exciting about the IETF standards is that they're actually addressing. Of the core issues of availability and and deep security in the TLS standard. And so there's a couple extensions to TLS that we're actively following. One's called encrypted client, hello, it's just starting to be rolled out, but basically it closes the last sort of loophole in TLS, which is what's called the server, the client, hello, or the server name, s and I. And so the the server name was like a tiny amount of data that the TLS connection would leak. And this is leaked on every single VPN provider today. What, what we're saying is that basically, you know, we want to close that too by aligning with the ITF encrypted client, hello, standard. And we also are very much looking at the TLS process for post quantum so, you know, basically, in 20 years, there's, there's a risk that the current generation of encryption becomes obviated or or not useful. And so we the the ITF is, is actively, you know, anticipating that's the case. And they're working on extensions to TLS to to be resilient to to fly on computers and so. So, yeah, we're very excited to align with the web standards and TLS so that we can, we can adopt the best of encryption standards into our product faster than than using other custom encryption.

Moderator  31:40  
Yeah, nice stuff there, because the project is here for the long term, not just others, random projects who just come for or Quick follow ups. And, you know, you close down the project, whatever is this clearly, I clearly defined objective here. The project is sure to go for the long term and, Yep, that's right,

Brien Colwell  32:07  
that's right. That's how we see it. We see this as not only a 10 year project, but 100 year project. I think if you look at our token and our and our the way that we we see our token is we see basically the the people participating in building today as building an infrastructure that will be around for 100 years, and that will basically accrue in value and and, you know, being early is the most important thing, because you're building something that will just, will just accrue in value and usage over the next 100 years. And we think that that's a that's a really big opportunity right now to participate and To earn points on the network.

Yeah, great questions. I

I think a lot, I think I lost the the mod, am I still here?

Well, I'm just going to fill in until, until the mod comes back. So I just want to re emphasize that you can download the app today. It's, you know, we've been in production since early 2020, 24 we are obsessed with building an app that has real value to users. We hope you download it. It's called your network from the Play Store and the App Store. Try it out. We hope you know feedback is super important to us. We see a lot of users replace their primary VPN with your network because of the quality of the network is, is and what we can offer with our decentralized model and availability model is just much higher than, than, than a more centralized network. And yeah, just, just want to do a shout out that everyone you know, if you can you know, please take the opportunity to download the app and try it out and send us feedback. Also, please check out our discord@discord.gg. Slash. You our network. We have a pretty active community there. And yeah, really, we're launching our points campaign this week. We're supposed to be launching last week. We're a little bit behind, but yeah, what we're doing is we have a three phases of earning. We've been doing airdrops since we started of USDC. We're actually entering a phase. We're going to do USDC airdrops plus points, plus referral airdrops and points so you actually, you can actually earn by referring people to the network using your referral code. And people can enter referral code anytime the details of. The points campaign are actually at the top of our Discord, if you want to read about how points are being allocated. But basically, when we launch our token, which will be phase three later in the year, the points will convert to a very substantial airdrop of token. And so our goal is that the community owns half of the token supply and okay, hey, welcome back. I was just filling in while you were while you're out.

Moderator  35:32  
Yeah, you aim to rebuild how the internet works. So can you break down the core architecture or protocol powering your network in simple terms, yeah, okay. Regarding this, I think you also have already answered this to the investors, so why don't we move to another question? Okay, so how does the URL network or the euro network, differs from other decentralized internal solutions like Nym or trade or Mysterio. So what's the difference between your network and other decentralized interns? Yeah,

Brien Colwell  36:16  
right. So I want to say that we all those projects you listed, I think, are crypto projects, and we actually started as not a crypto project. So we're a little bit like late to crypto. Actually in our project, we, like I mentioned, we launched the network in 2024 we we were not a crypto project. We thought, we thought we could build the best VPN as a product, as a real business. We didn't, you know, we didn't appreciate fully the benefit of the token and the crypto. We've come around to realize that the token lets us capture more value from what we're building. And we think that's a really good thing for all the all the community, all the participants, we think that we're building a real long term value, and that the best way for participants to capture that is through a token. And so we also think the token can help us with various predictive aspects of the network, such as capacity and reliability. We're really inspired by what's happening with prediction markets today, and how they're able to suss out information from from from people. And we think that for the particular problems of capacity and reliability, which are particularly challenging problems for every network, we think a token can actually help us with that. So if you look at how, and we'll release our white paper soon. We're still, we're still kind of deep in refining and iterating the implementation. But if you look at what we're planning to do is we're planning to let people stake their token with for capacity planning and reliability, and if they help us improve the capacity and reliability of the network, they can earn yield. And so what we're trying to do is very much align the yield mechanism of our token with the real hard challenges of of the network. And so we think that's really interesting for a token, speaking about other projects specifically, I just want to point out a few particularly, I think, salient differences with your network. So the first is, we are aiming to make participation very easy and safe. I touched on that a little bit before, but I want to go a little bit deeper, so anyone with the app can participate in the network. You do not need to run a separate program. You do not need to be a power user. If you just connect to the network and you're on a Wi Fi or unmetered network, you're a participant, and that is safe. Do our security program and and so that's why we think this is a very ethical and great way to scale the network. You can become a supporter, and you can get more options to on how to participate or turn off participating. And the supporter plan is $5 a month. And so we as a project from day one, we're focused on making sure the network could run entirely from mobile devices and actually be a four nines, fast, high quality network entirely from mobile devices. We felt like, if we could achieve that, we could we could achieve the proper provider to use a ratio, because there are so many mobile devices in the world, I think it's probably the most ubiquitous computing platform in the world. Is a mobile device. We felt like, if we could really make participating easy from a mobile device and safe, we could get we could get a lot of nodes, and. We've had a very particular focus on making sure that our mobile app is not only a user of the network, but a participant of the network. And so that's a lot of hard work, that's a lot of protocol and tweaks to how everything works, but that has been our focus from day one. And so if you use our app, what you'll see is you can participate. And our app, which is runs in the background, 24/7, on your IO, iPhone or Android device today. So so that's one difference. I don't believe these other networks do that same model. I think they bifurcate the users from the from the participants or the nodes. And that's something we absolutely did not want to do we want to make sure users were could participate. We also do have a power user node, where, if you want to just run a participation node, you can do that separately. It's a different program, a different experience, but it's for power users and like miners, stuff like that. People who really want to industrialize and deploy nodes can use the power user mode. So I would say the second thing we're really focused on is, because we're focused on so many participants, and having a really low ratio of user to participant, I would say quality and availability. Just the general availability focus has been, you know, particularly, particularly unique to us. I know this weekend, for example, I'll just give a quick anecdote. The team was, like, you know, working all weekend, because we were one of the only VPNs that worked in Iran throughout the weekend. And so, like, that's every crypto VPN, right? I mean, there was just a mass failure of VPN at all levels in Iran. Basically, they, you know, they got turned off, but, but we did not, we did not get turned off. And so we had a lot of users come on through the weekend, we've been having a ton of scale because, essentially, because of our particular focus on availability. And so I'd say that that's unique. I mean, we we take a lot of learnings from open source, we take a lot of learnings from, you know, generally, the internet and the world perspective of the internet and how it's working in different regions into account with our network. And so, for example, we do not see the internet widely adopting modern standards. Like, for example, we don't see modern protocols being widely adopted or supported. We think that the vast majority of the internet will be stuck on older protocols. And hence, that's why we have made particular effort to make sure that your network is native to older protocols. And I'm talking about the protocols that existed in like, you know, 2000 right? So we are particularly native and adopting of older protocols. That doesn't mean we don't use newer protocols. We do, we do support newer protocols, but those, those, those, unfortunately, are not widely available, and so it's a real challenge to basically, you know, be available and support newer protocols. And so what we do is we support many different protocols in our in our product, and that's one of the unique aspects of our products. We We are not all in on one protocol, but we are all in on TLS encryption. So no matter what protocol you're using in our application, you're using TLS encryption. You know, you're getting the highest quality encryption available, but it might be using like it might be wrapped into an older protocol. So, yeah, that's a great questions.

Moderator  43:40  
Yeah, yeah. Very good answer from you brother, go to see the project is not similar like that of the archery that Mrs. Jerry the very good one. Brother, very scalable one. So, yeah, um, for users in regions with or users with regions with strict Internet censorship, how effective is URL network in bypassing restrictions while maintaining performance, because some regions has a very strict internet connection, and the CANS will be able to connect in several VPNs, which is a very challenging situation. From there, from this, you know, forced to use other things like the mobile data or other stuffs Wi Fi. So how can the VPN be available for different users in different regions? Yeah,

Brien Colwell  44:41  
yeah, great question. So we covered some of this, but I want to, you know, sometimes it's useful talk about dual problems, which are problems that are the same problem, but framed, framed differently. And so if you're in a region with censorship, you want privacy. Security availability, and in a region that maybe doesn't have as much censorship, one of the dual problems that we think is really interesting is public Wi Fi that logs and monetizes your data. We think that just the simple fact of having to, like, log into a public Wi Fi and like, give all this like email and personal information is like, a a dual problem to availability, meaning like, you know you're being sort of like, blocked from using the internet until you like register yourself or like Identify yourself in some way. And so I want to say that we, we actually, we actually work on that problem. So we work on the problem of being able to use public Wi Fi, anonymously, without logging in, which is a dual problem to being able to use the internet available in different regions. It's, it might not seem like it, but it's a, it's a very similar problem and so, so, so we actually see a lot of commonality. Our mission, again, is to give users private, available and secure internet. We think we're giving we're basically giving users privacy and security and making sure that, you know, how can we do that if the internet doesn't work right? And so we think availability is a an aspect of privacy and security that we focus on, and so we don't, you know, that's how we frame our mission. And I will say that we focus on not only the mission in other countries, but we focus on the mission like we're a US company, and we focus on the mission around Wi Fi hotspots, and that's something that we are like focused on. And so, so we have a particular focus on this area, which translates to benefits in different regions. And so if you look at a lot of the research that's that's done in this area of availability, you'll see a lot of it does not get translated or deployed to consumer products. And one thing we do is we make sure we stay current with the current research. There's many open source projects around availability and, you know, forming connections through various adversarial networks. For example, there's a project called GFW dot dev for Great Firewall. Dot Dev, I mean, for many people in, you know, in like a country like United States, we have a very hard time understanding the particular challenges that are happening in different parts of the world, and so the only way that we can really understand it is to try to emulate it and and test against various adversarial conditions. So I mentioned public Wi Fi. Another one that we we test against is called GFW dot Dev. We currently pass all the tests of the GFW dot Dev, but, um, but Right, this is, this is really a space of staying current, staying abreast of of what's working in the world and and just trying to accelerate the adoption of various techniques that you'll find in open source into our product. And that's, that's generally what what we're doing, I think, because we are, we are not committed to, like, for example, one particular protocol, you'll see us being very flexible with different protocols and different different approaches that that other projects might not have the same flexibility because of, I would say, like maybe a misplaced adherence to that, like one, one protocol is better than The other protocols. I think for us, we think TLS is the best, and then we're going to wrap TLS into a bunch of protocols. And so we don't, we don't necessarily see us as being having to use a specific protocol. We instead, we, we just make sure we use TLS across the board. Great question. I hope that answered the question.

Moderator  49:30  
Yeah, yeah, that's answered the question. It's got to set. The project is now covering different areas, different areas in the country, like not always on specific regions. Yeah, this is a very good thing that's gonna make the project spread to different different areas in the world. So, um, is there a staking or Node running mechanism, you know, for the community participation and what have. What responsibility does it involve? Like, what can they be? What? What must they do before they can be, you know, eligible to to have this year?

Brien Colwell  50:12  
Yeah, so, so, like I mentioned, we wanted to make it easy for anyone to participate. We think that's our strength. We anyone can hop on and participate. There's zero verification. There's zero KYC, zero anything. It's just hop on and participate. We're a true commodity protocol, you know, we actually view it like, you know, the protocol is a commodity. It's just out there. It's just anyone can can participate in the protocol, right? And so the the requirements for participation, it basically works like this. When you participate, you are eligible for users to trial your node. So I mentioned there's an auction process that every user goes through. It works like basically a user says, Give me 12 providers in this region, and I'm going to do a trial connection to each one, and whichever one serves the content the fastest, I'm going to use and send more more more traffic that direction to that server. So when you participate, you're eligible. And the general incentive is, if you're fast and you're reliable, you get more you win more options. You You know, you get more traffic. And the general reward structures that the more traffic you route, the more rewards you get. There's a little bit of a caveat, which is that we, because we're a freemium product, we have a lot of free users. We have a certain set of users who pay, which are called supporters. The traffic from supporters is much more influential in determining, in determining the payout, then the free traffic. So the supporters are the ones who really determine who gets paid. So wherever the the supporter users are using the network, that's, that's, that's where the payout goes. And right now we're doing USDC air drops. We're transitioning to, you know, ultimately, where we want to be at the end of year is token airdrops. And the basic idea is that, you know, you're gonna have companies basically using and reselling the network at dollars or our local Fiat, and then to basically use the network, they have to convert that Fiat to to token. And so there's going to be, you know, basically a a conversion price of token of of gigabyte Fiat to token that we think positively scales as the as demand for private and secure and available data goes up. So you can imagine that, for example, in like, say, every like, so many years, the demand for private, secure, available data, data doubles. That would mean that the the the amount of the Fiat, amount of token, of purchase of the token, is doubling, but, but the amount of token is basically staying fixed. And so you can see that that's the basic mechanism that we think, I mean, you know, just like a true commodity, right? Like the network is, like gold or something, right? Like, basically, we're creating this network that anyone can tap into and and we're hoping that that basically gets resold in local currency because fixed to data transfer, because, because that, we think will have a very positive long term demand for for the network. And so that's the basic idea. You know, anyone can run a node. Anyone can route data. It's safe to run a node. You can actually run a node directly from the apps, or you can download a we have a Docker image as well, and we also have a bunch of binaries for different platforms. Like Raspberry Pi is open WRT routers, different router platforms, etc. You can pretty much put a provider anywhere. We have people running on all kinds of hardware. And so yeah, basically check out. We have a docs called docs dot. You are.io and all of our builds are open source, so we have a build repo where you can catch the latest builds, and we have a ton of setup scripts as well, and just just hop on our Discord and people can help you basically set up the scripts. Great question.

Moderator  54:42  
Yeah. Go to see the project, you know, has a very good goes taking feature here whereby users can get rewarded when they you know, when they're active in the project, running some tax. Yes, and they get some real SDC and rewards. So everything seems very organic here. What everyone should look on board to, you know, APE into the project, get to the platform, make use of the VPN. Everything looks very organic here. So I think I'm going to take a last question before we're going to take some comments and questions and, you know, wrap up the show. So from what you said, you from what you said, you have the apps in the URL network infrastructure, right?

Brien Colwell  55:41  
That's right. Yeah, they're live in the App Store.

Moderator  55:44  
So do you plan to onboard more developers into the projects? Yeah, and if so, how accessible are your APIs and SDKs?

Brien Colwell  55:58  
Yeah, great question. Yeah, we do have an SDK today. It's in Go, the Go programming language, but we also compile adapters for iOS and Android. So it's really easy to embed in iOS and Android. Today, we hope to make it easier to embed in more languages, like we've actually been looking at Python and JavaScript as sort of the next two we want to support. So we do have an SDK, and you can basically use the network instead of using the platform native TCP or UDP connection. You can basically just use the SDK to create a different type of UDP and TCP connection, but that that goes over the network, and so that's really easy to, like, integrate that into, like, your your HTTP libraries, or whatever networking protocol libraries you use in your products. You can basically just swap out the the connection for for the your network connection, and then you get a private, secure, available connection. In terms of more developers, we're currently a team of two full time and two part time. We also have a number of discord moderators and community contributors, and so we do hope to grow the team. We're currently a very, like, small project. We were seed funded as a product company. Like I said, we're we didn't start as a token company. So we haven't, like sold token, or like done anything with like selling token, and we don't actually have any plans to sell token. We want to kind of maintain a pro as a product company, kind of like circle, I guess where, like, you know, circle, just iPod has been really great, and, you know, they're, they're basically a product company, right? Like, people invest in circle the product. They're not like investing in circle token, as far as I'm aware. So that's kind of what we want to be, too. We think of ourselves as, like, you know, circles are kind of an inspiration for us. Like, you know, it's a it's a business that heavily is built around a token, and that is trying to use the best, the best aspects of a token. But it's ultimately not selling token. It's selling, selling products and so, so that's an inspiration for us. Yeah, we were. We're looking at raising a little more money to bring more people on. Probably what you'll see from us is we'll probably bring on someone to focus, like, full time on the security aspect. And like I said, we have the security program. We really want to make that big. We want to make that like standard. We think it's a huge contribution to the VPN space and and we want to, we want to make sure that we're, we're out ahead of issues that users are going to have. Because, like I said, you know, part making the participation the project safe and easy, that's like a number one concern for us. And so, yeah, I think, I think if we hired more people, we probably, yeah, probably the first hire agency from us is on the security

Moderator  59:10  
side, yeah. Because when there are more people in charge of the projects, everything becomes more aligned and more, you know, more focused when everyone has a particular target. This one focused on driving and more users in the project. One on developing the projects. One on using security like I'm still what I'm saying, so this should be a very good incentive to keep the project stable. So, um, I think I'm gonna ask one last question before we begin coming situation, um, regarding the marketing of the project. You know, marketing is a very important aspect of any projects. I've seen some VPNs which are very good, yeah, but they didn't even get to do to the. World agents go to diverse place in the country or two different sections. This is due to the low level of marketing and promotion. So what do you think towards marketing? Have you any planned or existing partnerships or promotion you've been running? And that's increases the project visibility?

Brien Colwell  1:00:22  
Yeah. We started to do some stuff like these, amas have been really, you know, we're starting like, what we hope to do is continue the cadence of amas. We hope to do at least a couple a week just to continue, continue, you know, getting the word out, the conversation about the project and we also have been doing some more engagement on X, like we think that getting the word out on X is important, but I think ultimately what we hope to do is we hope to build a high quality product that People get value from so we look at retention. So how many people who install the app actually use it as their like, daily VPN? That's like a really important number for us for, like, long term. And so we really care about the overall quality, meaning, like the performance, the feel like, is the VPN, you know, giving users what they want. We really value all the feedback there. We get a lot of feedback in discord. We just, you know, we're really, that's like, our number one metric of, like, are we retaining users? And then beyond that, we realize that, you know, we really have to align the the incentive structure with in a way that we can, we can bring on more more users, and that that doesn't like dilute everyone's earnings. And so, you know, that's something that we're, we think we're, we're working on right now. So what we're, what we actually just launching this week is our referral campaign. So if you're someone who refers a lot of people, what that means is like your earnings might go down, but you you can actually, you can actually get we've added a whole different referral AirDrop category, so you can actually get earnings just from from your referrals earnings as well. And if you're someone who joins and uses the network from a referral, you can actually share in some of the earnings as an additional bonus from from the network that referred you. So so we think referrals is like, really interesting, because that organic growth, you know, we want to find the Win Win, where we can bring more people into the network, the network is better, and then also, you know, people's earnings actually goes up. I mean, that's, that's kind of the goal, right? It's like, if we get more people and the network gets better and the earnings go up, we think we've kind of found the fit. And so that's, that's what we're really kind of focused on right now, is like, is that core, that core fit of, can we grow the network, you know, give more, give more participants, and make the network better and also make people's earnings go up? That's, that's like our core problem right now.

Moderator  1:03:17  
Yeah, cool. I'm with marketing set in place and a very solid same like yours. This is sure to go to diverse places in the world. And definitely good, definitely gonna bring in some good amounts of users into the project. Um, let me pick some comments equations from the comments. Yeah,

Brien Colwell  1:03:49  
yeah. And I actually have a hard stop in a few minutes. I am I have to, I have to take off. So I sorry to cut this short, but I hope we can do another one of these soon, and I really appreciate everyone's time so, so So maybe just, how about we do a couple questions and then, and then we can wrap it up.

Moderator  1:04:05  
So about language? The language is a very vital aspect and projects like VPN, so how do you plan to address language barriers in space where users have different language,

Brien Colwell  1:04:24  
yeah. So we're like, super pro AI on this. So if you look at our website, we translate it to as many languages as we can. We actually chose our like, our web platform based on the one that could like translate, Auto Translate our web page for us, so our website's available, I think in five different languages. We want to be in more. It's just like they have a technical limitation right now. But I think as if we get some more money in the company, you know, we probably want to upgrade that so we can actually add more languages to our website. You. Um. And additionally, the app, you should see, the app, has already been translated to, I think, 20 languages. We use AI to translate. So I'm not saying that we we speak 20 languages or something. We just do translation with AI, but, but we think that that's like, like, a really good use of AI. Because certainly, like, if it gets us, like, 80% 90% there, we think that that's better than, like, just being like, English only app. And so we do have a, like, a really serious commitment from day one, like, from day one, we've had multiple languages in our app. We've had multiple languages on our website, and if there's a language we're missing, yeah, please just, just tell us. Because, please join our Discord and tell us. Because, like I said, it's like we do, like an AI thing, so we just kind of plug in different languages, and it's not like a huge deal for us to add more, but we're just, yeah, I guess we're, we're just not sure which ones to add, I guess, at the moment, so just, uh, yeah, please let us know.

Moderator  1:06:10  
Yeah, yeah, cool. Um, the project is a very, very solid one. I must say, the coming situations ape into the projects after this. If you have any questions which you haven't, you know which, which haven't been answered yet, the discord is opened. There are enough people to to, um, reach out to your questions and attend to it. So let's take one final question before we wrap up the show.

Awesome. I'm regarding restrictions. Are there any particular places in the world which are restricted from using the platform? Yeah,

Brien Colwell  1:06:58  
okay, so, so we're US company, right? So we can't distribute in some app stores. So some app stores are off limits for us. And so that's just, that's just because of us, company, like, for example, you won't see us distributing in Russia, you won't see us distributing in Iran, in North Korea, you won't see us distributing in China. That's just because we're a US company, right? We have to FOLLOW US law. However, we also have heavy emphasis on open source. So our app is available on F droid I mentioned so you can go get and it's not only available on F droid, but, you know, we put the effort in to create a reproducible build on F droid. So after I verifies that our app can can be built and signed correctly from the open source so, so it's really safe to use F droid because they've, they've verified our build for us. And so it's available in F droid. F droid is available in every country, as far as I'm aware, because it's open source project. Our app is also available for download through GitHub. So if you can, if you can load GitHub, you can download our app. And so you know our perspective is like a user as a user, meaning like we can't distribute in certain countries, but we support all our users. So like every user, our mission is to give every user private, secure, available internet. We, you know, that's our mission. You know whether it's an American traveling in China or whatever, like our mission is our mission, and so you'll see us like, we don't distribute our apps in certain locations, but we support all our users and so, so that's our that's our general approach, yeah, but yeah, I hope that answers the question,

Moderator  1:08:57  
Yeah, that's the project. Is a very good one, yeah, and it's good to see it also expands to some traditional platforms to buy this, even people in YouTube or tick tock, they are sure to use the VPN as well. And you know, stuffs like that. And the security aspects as well. I must comment, security aspects, everything looks very organic, no malicious actors or exploitation. Yeah, very, very impressive one, I must say. And yeah, even the community members here get, still gets rewarded when they use the the staking aspect and the reward parts, so is it like a win win for the project and the community members as well. So very. I commend your efforts. Man,

Brien Colwell  1:09:53  
awesome. Thank you, and I really thank everyone for taking the time to chat today and and learn. More about the project, and I hope to continue the conversation in future amas, as well as on Discord or wherever that might be. And yeah, like, like, always, the biggest compliment you can give us is, is using the app and and giving us feedback. We really appreciate all the feedback that just helps us get better. We want to hear from users all around the world and build an app that just a network that just works everywhere in the world. So, so thank you very much for the opportunity. And, yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for for the great questions and and I hope to chat again soon. Yeah. Yeah, bro, no,

Moderator  1:10:43  
nice, nice to have you, man,

Brien Colwell  1:10:45  
great. Thank you.

Moderator  1:10:46  
Yeah, peace, bye.

