DAPPCON 2025: Gnosis VPN- What does it take to build a true web3 product - Sebastian Bürgel

Transcript

[Applause] All right, thanks for having me here and uh yeah, so first of all uh sorry for the ones who are coming for a talk. Uh I'm not here for a talk. This is DAPCON. I want to show how we bring the D back into DAPS. I'm Sebastian. I'm VP technology at Nosis and I am the founder of Hopper. And what these two things have to do with one another is something that I'm looking forward to talk to you about. So yeah, this is about NosisVPN and if we're talking about how we bring the D back into DAPs, we realize that the D first of all stands for

decentralization. But there's also this narrative that I really appreciate quite a lot that Vitalik brought recently of defensive accelerationism. In short, we have these wonders of the technologies that we all work on, but we want to roll it out to the planet in a safe fashion, being mindful that the greatness of the technologies that we all work on is also used by bad people and might have consequences. So, one important thing for me is privacy or anonymity. If we talk about data being sent around the most fundamental of those in all these peer-to-peer systems where data typically goes across the wire, right,

all peers have to talk to other peers and I talked last year here at Dupcon on what could go wrong in that is yeah data transport. So I talk about NosisVPN and I'm here today to show a new version of Nosvpn which is still a proof of concept. It's still pretty early and yeah, this one is as of now available uh in an what we call unrestricted proof of concepts. So yeah, I'll dive right into that now. Yeah, uh VPN.nosis. Uh what is this all about? Let's first look at what's happening behind the scenes. How do we claim to bring the uncensible open internet in the most anonymous fashion? So NosisVPN is

building on the hopper mixnet. What does that mean? Uh on the right we see a uh artistic representation of a mixnet which comprises of many nodes which send packets to one another. And as you have trouble kind of figuring out how these packets are being routed, that is exactly what we want to achieve. Not just for you but for powerful corporations and state level actors that are trying to spy on us. They're trying to undermine our digital interactions that we have on every single day at every single second with every service that we interact with. And yeah, so what is happening is that we build a network which allows you to root packets that

are being relayed by other peers in the network. And they're not just rerouting your packets, they're mixing it up in other traffic that looks indistinguishable from your packets. And on top of that mixnet infrastructure which you can use for any sort of packet routting application, we are now building a VPN that ultimately aims to be an application on your laptop or on your mobile that you can use just like a normal VPN, but it is the most anonymous fashion that you could access web 3 infrastructure.

Now, what do I mean with web 3 infrastructure exactly? And it seems to me that there's some clarification that's necessary. So, first of all, it means to no user tracking of any kind. I thought, what a stupid thing to put on here. That's obvious, right? It seems to me that it's not always obvious, right? We have to be respecting the privacy of the individual. And that starts there and it continues with the technology we utilize, right? It means committing to not using a centralized RPC provider.

Now that is tough. How many people here are running adopt now? Just quick check. Nice. Wonderful. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for supporting decentralized networks. Right. We are mindful of the fact that this is hard and we'll later on briefly talk about how we want to roll that out at larger scale. For the ones who maybe still have friends who don't run a node at home. It also means for the folks who actually built DAPs here not relying on centralized indexers because I think that is a disgrace. Relying on centralized infrastructure that you blindly trust is not what we set out to build here. It also means beyond indexers not any other APIs that you leak user metadata because there's

always some provider which can capture data from your users that can be used against your users. Now I heard from DAP developers I don't care. Well, the user does care. The user does care and there's laws and regulations increasingly in place to try to protect your users in case the developer doesn't care. Now, let's take a step back here and as developers try to improve that. Now, that all sounds painful. I know, right? I know that we want to build fast. We want to ship products and we want to get there ASAP. And I argue that it is possible. it is possible to build these applications and what I'm showing here although it's a proof of concept

tries to give a first glimpse of how that can actually be rolled out. So briefly what what we'll be looking at is shown here on the right hand side of this of this screen. Um we have on your user device a noisVPN client. Currently that's a command line application but again this is Dapcon so I hope you're fine counting that as a DAP. And currently this comes with an entry node to this hopper mixet. That's what I showed before. This this packet mixing infrastructure that you gain access to that roots and reroots your data packets to no towards the NosisVPN exit node that gives you the actual access to the internet fetches information from a web server and sends it back through this

mixet to your NosisVPN client that is locally running on your machine. So yeah, so how does this look like and how does this work? Well, I would say let's see. Uh this is an actual live demo and I hope that it works despite the hardships of trying to build a web 3 product. All right, so currently there's an onboarding on GitHub and the first thing that I'll skip over um just because of shortness of time is you need access to a hopper node. I have access to my hopper note here. Uh that's one of these nodes you saw in the animation that is kind of relaying packets to all sorts of people. That's the web interface that it exposes to me. Um and

yeah, we don't need to understand what it does. Uh it has a bunch of hopper tokens. It has a safe because every hopper node is a safe by the way. Great infrastructure to build with. And this is the entry node that I will collect to to route my traffic to the internet. All right. So, I have that one. That's that's good. Now, let's see what we need to do. Like, what we need to do is you can do this. All of this is publicly available. So, for the ones who want to play along, uh vpn.nosis.eth.limo is a starting point. So, what I'm what I'm going to do here now is uh yeah, I will I will just run this installer. So I'm downloading a binary which is installing NosusVPN binaries

and this one is basically asking me for a connection to my hopper node. If you remember in animation I showed you before this needs to get access to the pack packet mixing infrastructure. So I'm going to give it to it. Um it requires a port for me to connect to and yeah it will now download the binaries that are required. um yeah to run this. So we have two binaries here. One is the VPN and the other one is some controller interface. Controller for the ones here that are using VPNs allows you to say which server do you want to use? Do you want to be in Germany? Do you want to be in Spain? Do you want to be in the US or wherever you want to be? Who here is using a VPN? By the way, any casual VPN users in the room? Cool. All right. I

hope to convert you all towards NosisVPN later on this year once this maybe becomes less painful or for the ones who have higher pain threshold you can try it out right now. All right. So let's let's see what's going on here. Um this one created a folder for me called Nosvpn. So um I'll go there and first of all I'll start the uh VPN app. It's basically what it's telling me up here, right? So, I'm just going to start the um the NosisVPN app um and I'll pass it a config file. So, that config file currently tells it which exit nodes are around and um yeah starts doing that doesn't do much yet.

The second thing that we will now start is we have this we have this config app, right? So we have this NosisVPN control app and that's what's used to configure my VPN. So we can ask it for status. So my NOSVPN dab, it currently tells me, okay, the connection is down. Uh I'm not connected to anything, but I know of a few exit peers. And the first thing you see here already is these are not DNS names. These are not IP addresses. These are Hopper peer IDs.

Yeah. So these are kind of nodes in this Hopper peer-to-peer network that I can't connect to through my Hopper node and therefore I'm not connected to any kind of centralized infrastructure like DNS um you know or or any other services. It's all trying to be reliant on information that I have available locally. All right. So let's initiate a connection. So let's tell it to you see the commands that this DAP here has available novpn connect and I will connect to Germany. Um so I copy this pd. Uh if you find this command line interface a little bit cringe. Yes there

will be a UI. Uh we had a team uh last weekend at the web 33 privacy now hackathon already working on some but I'll stick to command line because I know how that works for now. All right. So I'm connecting to a pier. Let's see what our um actual VPN app is doing. It's yeah, it's setting up a it's setting up a VPN connection from my entry node via some intermediate mix node. So, currently I selected only one mix node uh towards this exit node that I've chosen here. What you might have seen uh is that up here there was a VPN icon popping up. That is because this client application established a wire guard connection and I have the VPN

running. Currently I'm not using it yet. So um if I check out my IP address here I see you know this this IP address. Interestingly kind of funny like this venue here is its own ISP. So I see what I'm connected to. Now, let's go ahead and let's con let's uh set up the um let's set up a proxy to use the actualVPN. So, I'm using this in Firefox. I'm configuring the proxy and let's see if it works. Um I'm trying to get my IP address again.

Um okay, so something went down here. Um currently it's trying to reestablish a new session. Probably it's going to take a few second before it reestablishes a second. It seems that worked. That's why it took a few seconds longer. And indeed, we see I'm currently connected to Frankfurt. So, I established a VPN connection through this underlying mixet, exposed it as a proxy into my browser, and I'm connected to the VPN. I'm just going to open them side by side. So, if something breaks or some of the nodes in between goes down, I I can see what's going on. Okay. you know, this is a VPN and, you know, there's maybe some performance issues, but let's see what we can actually do.

Like, can we use this early PC version uh already for something? So, I'm going to uh try to open, you know, something like Twitter. And yeah, we'll we'll see if this one uh can actually be used to route traffic. Well, and the answer is right now we can't really. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect to another server. So, I'm going to connect to Spain. See how that one is going. Spain is an entry note. So, you'll see that my VPN connection dropped off here and um my VPN client tries to establish a new connection and yeah, it seems the

session got opened. I have a wire guard connection open here and yeah, awesome. Okay, it seems that we were loading part of a video of this uh of this live stream here. Let me reload that. Um, yeah. Okay, awesome. It seems we have a live stream running here. There's a bit of a lag, but yeah. So, that's the unrestricted PC of Nosvpn. [Applause] Thank you. Um, yeah, I'm kind of happy that this worked. This is a bit meta.

I'm connected now to Hopper via NosVPN. Okay. Uh, what did I want to talk about? Let's get back to this one here. By the way, uh, this page now again very meta is being loaded through Nosvpn. Um, let's see if that works. Yeah, cool. All right. Where was I? Uh, I showed you the demo. Now, what is going on here? How does this compare to your existing VPN and other VPNs? So, we have something that's rooted through this mixet and it's multihop architecture which makes it surveillance resistance.

So, if there's anyone who tries to spy on you, um, yeah, they're going to have a way harder time. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying it's way harder. And how does it compare to a VPN? So, quick recap for the ones who just use a VPN without wondering what it actually does. You route your traffic from your node via somebody else's server to the wider internet. Okay, that's not great. You just try trust somebody else's server. With tour, you basically do the same thing, but there's kind of three servers in between, and you trust that the first and the last are not colluding. In case of NosisVPN utilizing Hopper, we trust that just one mix node along the path is honest. Now something that we're excited about uh

coming soon is kind of unblockable exits that you know you cannot find and cannot uh yeah get in touch with as well as residential IPs. So currently this is operated by Nosis exit nodes. We want to enable all of you to run exits if you choose so and if you want to earn tokens for doing so of course you know to uh judge if you want to expose your home IP address for other people to use and earn money with that. if you want to do that, it will be available soon. And yeah, so some of the things that I'm excited about uh going soon and just to spend a few minutes on what's coming next and why this is not really a fullyfledged application that at least

most of your friends can use is well you needed this separate hopper node, right? this interface that I showed you that's not exactly useful if you want to install an app and have to set up a safe bridge money over to Nosis chain and wrap hopper token to wx hopper token and so on. There's a bunch of work there but what we're working towards is have what we call edge nodes which are running inside your device which are not used for packet mixing of other people's traffic but which are used to integrate the direct access to the hopper network in one application that you can install. That leads over to the second point have kind of streamlined uh UX for the whole thing. And finally uh for the people who are interested in more of the cryptography behind it, I invite you to

look at this. We have a um yeah we have some RFC on that um on this anonymous return path which is actually super cool. You can connect to an exit server and say, "Hey, give me this website like x.com." And the server responds something, but they don't know who you are. It sounds kind of weird, right? You're you're getting something back, but they don't know where to send it to. So, you can imagine it like you give somebody an envelope and it has a return envelope in it where they pack a payload in, send it back. They have no idea where it's actually going until it comes to you. And, you know, with the next request, you do the same thing. So something that uh will be available very

soon and yeah just to give some glimpse of why we're not there yet but uh that will be available soon and yeah lastly Nosvpn is as mentioned uh running on top of the hopper mixnet. The hopper mixnet is uh relying on settlement infrastructure called Nosis chain. Why nos's chain actually? Um when we started this we looked at a whole bunch of chains and what properties do we want? We want something that's actually very resilient. So like you know base and all of the other kind of centralized L2s are obviously out of the picture because VPN and an anonymity infrastructure is something that many people don't like. And when you go when

you can go to, you know, Coinbase and say, "Hey guys, uh, you're not allowed to do that anymore, otherwise we ban you from our next military parade." That's not great, right? That's not great for actual resilience infrastructure that makes the web 3 for me. So, Nosis chain is a very decentralized chain that is also, you know, at least currently not heavily used. That makes it kind of convenient for us. So, we have predicted gas prices and so on. That's great. I did mention already uh every hopper node is a safe or more specifically connected to a safe to separate your operational concerns. You know like the devops fiddling from the finance you know finance is like okay I want to manage

money and I want to manage the risk and access to money and safe is basically that what we use to separate these two areas of concerns. And finally uh the underlying transport that we leverage is lip P2P an infrastructure that's used in the space by most Ethereum nodes and NOS chain nodes as well as IPFS and yeah this work has been supported by Nosis DAO uh GIP98 and 122 uh that enabled that you will see another GIP coming soon uh we're setting up a new entity um that is offering this uh this product and this new company will belong 100% to Nosis DAO and a commitment to build this in the open. Obviously, all

of that is free and open source software and under ownership of Nosis DAO. Yes. So, with that, I would like to close here. I invite you to check it out again. VPN.nosis.eth if you still need a centralized resolver. That's limo. And yeah, with that, I'll close here and I'm open for some questions. [Applause] Thanks uh thank you very much for the talk. Um my question is you said no user tracking of any kind. Yes. And my my

question is how we balance this idea which of course I think everyone that's in this room today agrees with full decentralization with the need uh of security for example. I think that as much as we agree with decentralization we still want to have our kids protector protected of a sexual abuse or uh of a terrorist attack that is being coordinated through a fully decentralized and unttrackable uh VPN. Yeah. Um, at Hopper in Atnosis, we believe that, you know, bad things happen in the world and we do not want to support it, right? And it is indeed challenging to balance these two. So, we will for the NosisVPN which you can run

on your node and that's what's happening right now. If you try to access some bad stuff on the internet, it will not be available. So the exits are you know censoring bad things and that's already implemented right now. Um yeah to protect people and also to protect node runners because frankly what's happening here is you're exposing your home IP address to anybody out there. There are obvious issues with that. So we give you the tools to censor whatever is legal in your place. Beyond that, I mean I see actually I mean again I I think that is an issue and we give people the tools to protect themselves and protect the network. uh I am more concerned about the marketing side of uh the story

because marketing and growth people typically want to know what's the user profile right and yeah I mean uh I think we have to just not cut corners and you know engage with our user audience to try to understand it instead of tracking all like tracking all is a sledgehammer that always works and you can use it for everything tracking is fantastic I say user tracking is a loweffort way of getting what you actually want to get because you don't care about all the tracking. What you care typically about is understanding user behavior and I claim that is doable in other ways than just full-on tracking.

Any other questions? What do you um think the throughput through the hopper might be? How many users can be connected with a reasonable speed? Yeah. Um, great question. So, first of all, it is going to be slower than what you have today, right? So, okay, I'm going to push it a bit, but I will try it anyway. Um, so let let's see. Um, so this is actually going through like three hopper nodes and it seems that I can get to around 1 megabit per second.

Um, okay, we're getting a bit bit more. That's like that's enough for HD video streaming. Maybe it's not yet enough for 4K, but you can get speed. Again, this is a PC. I think this can be improved over time. Now that that is on one user to answer your question right so that's what I get and the the second part of the question is uh kind of what is the network provide so first some property that is very cool we talk a lot about scalability right and Jordi just had like a very wonderful contribution to Ethereum scalability which is very tricky these networks like hopper network scales really nicely which is perfectly horizontal if you want more network bandwidth you just need more

nodes and currently we have in a network um let's see um around 300 to 400 nodes which yeah I mean currently this is actually more limited uh like in a novpn you're limited more by the user device because your user device is what uh creates the packets so you see here we have around 300 400 nodes online right now uh this one since you're bounded more by the compute load on your entry node which does path selection, packet creation, and return packet creation.

Actually, um it should scale well also with the number of exits. I can't give you exact numbers, but I am pretty sure that the first couple of thousand users, we're fine with a relatively small network of uh a few hundred mix nodes. But again I also think that this is web 3 is actually kind of cool for that because as you have more usage of that the return of currently like you earn around 10% APR for running a note and relaying traffic that will go up right it's not just this is not an investment sort of thing right you don't put in money to to earn more money this is you're relaying traffic and for that you earn and if you relay more because there's more organic users that pay for

this you will earn more and that's why I'm kind of hopeful ful that this will kind of always find its own balance. Uh, can we all please have a