Portals VPN builds on top of Mysterium Network
We’re excited to announce the first project building on Mysterium Network! Mysterium Network is building a decentralised VPN, but we are also fundamentally an open source VPN. Portals has built on top of our open-source infrastructure to bring consumer VPN users into Mysterium ecosystem.
To celebrate this new milestone, Portals is offering a discount to all Mysterium users who’d like to sign up and give their Android application a go.
Related: What is a VPN connection? And why is it needed as our internet splinters apart?
What is Portals?
Portals is a dVPN application that plugs directly into Mysterium Network’s pool of nodes. Yes, you heard correct – a business, building on our infrastructure and sending traffic to our node network. And it doesn’t stop there.
Portals are focused on consumer adoption. They offer a subscription service, with monthly or annual payments. This means that Portals users can pay not just with cryptocurrencies, but with cold hard credit cards. Under the hood, this will drive traffic into Mysterium Network and tokens into Mysterium node runners’ pockets.
Once a user signs up for Portals, all they need to do is pick the country they’d like to connect to. Portals’ built-in algorithm selects the best nodes for them to connect to based on quality, and the service the user is looking to access.
Portals also offer live chat, which means anyone with issues getting their dVPN application up and running will have a helping hand.
A small step for dApps, a giant step towards mass adoption.
With Portals, users will be able to access the benefits of Mysterium Network’s pool of residential IPs without having to even know what ETH or MYST is! More users and traffic will flow into Mysterium Network, without all that crypto mumbo jumbo needing to be explained to people who just want an app that’s easy to use.
Portals app is available on Android, Mac and Windows. Check them out here.
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Why are decentralized VPNs important?
Centralized VPNs today have full access to the history and metadata of what we consume online.
“The websites we browse, torrents we download, movies we watch on Netflix, the time we spend playing games, watching Youtube, idling on social networks – we can only imagine (and know from certain instances) how this data is used to track us and eventually influence our behaviour,” says the team behind Portals VPN.
“This influence is so strong yet so concealed, that we have the right to replace the term “influence” to the term “control” in this context.”
Portals VPN is built on the belief that the more Internet users become aware of this control that centralized VPN providers have, the more they will turn to decentralized solutions.
Why is this step important to Mysterium Network?
Mysterium Network is building a distributed VPN node network.
While we have a reference implementation of our technology available, as an open-source VPN one of our goals is to help create tooling that allows for easy integration into our node network.
This means that we can continue to focus on building our node software, nurturing our community of nodes and helping developers build apps that drive traffic through the network.
Portals building on top of Mysterium is an important step for us as it will help us with the following:
Getting feedback on our developer documentation to ease future open source adoption of our technology;
Building processes to help onboard open-source talent more seamlessly into first learning about Mysterium technology, and then building on top of it;
Gaining a new channel through which traffic will enter our network and gets distributed across our node runners.
An open Internet for all
Portals and Mysterium are just two of the many projects pioneering decentralization. The ecosystem is made up of a range of companies, initiatives and projects all working together to create a better Internet for all.
The magic of decentralized technology means that different platforms complement each other, merging to form a new Internet that is as accessible, interoperable and open – as if it were one.
Related: Read our behind-the-scenes look into how networks like these are built.
Stay tuned for our developer bounties
Portals is the first of many projects that we hope will join us in building Mysterium’s wider ecosystem. We will be announcing developer bounties on the 1st of March through our blog and community channels, so stay tuned to find out how you can contribute to a more free, more open Internet – and earn while you do it.