The State of Decentralized VPNs (and Why URnetwork is One to Watch) 🕵️‍♀️

How truly safe is your connection? 🤔

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are one of the most widely used privacy tools on the internet. In 2023 alone, industry analysts reported more than 785 million VPN downloads worldwide, with adoption surging during the pandemic as remote work and streaming drove demand.

NordVPN and Surfshark became household names (ever watched a YouTube video without them sponsoring? 😏) — promising to mask your IP, prevent snooping, and bypass restrictions.

And yet, for all their marketing about “no logs” and “secure servers,” traditional VPNs remain centralized businesses. They operate clusters of servers in data centers, which can be seized by authorities or throttled by ISPs. Their privacy claims are difficult to verify since their code and infrastructure remain closed.

At the end of the day, users like us are left with a one-sided system: pay a subscription fee, pray the servers are fast enough, and hope the provider is actually honest about their VPN model.

It’s a fragile foundation. Especially in a world where the stakes for online privacy keep rising.

That’s why a new idea has begun to take shape: decentralized VPNs (dVPNs).

In this blog you’ll be reading about:

• How dVPNs actually get better (and ready for AI hordes) the more people pile in 🤯
• Why URnetwork is shaking things up with multi-hop privacy + weekly USDC 💸
• The quirks dVPNs still need to fix; and why that makes them fun to watch 👀

VPNs aren’t enough anymore

The shortcomings of centralized VPNs are not theoretical; they play out in practice. 😅

In 2016, Turkey seized an ExpressVPN server that was being used to investigate the assassination of a Russian diplomat. One box in one data center = game over.

6 years later, India’s cybersecurity rules forced VPN providers to shut down their physical servers in the country. Most providers packed up and left.

And just this year, Russia blocked hundreds of VPN services, banned VPN advertising, and imposed fines for using VPNs to access banned content.

These incidents highlight the vulnerability of the traditional client–server model.

Centralized VPNs create choke points that governments or ISPs can pressure, confiscate, or completely BLOCK. Even when not under legal scrutiny, their performance often degrades as more users join — a paradox where the quality of service declines precisely when demand is highest.

Decentralized VPNs flip this equation. Instead of bottlenecking traffic through limited server clusters, they distribute it across thousands (eventually millions) of independent participants.

In practice, that means quality improves with scale. More participants = more available nodes and better performance.

A VPN like this won’t just support today’s internet users; it’s what makes the most sense when billions of AI agents and devices that will require secure and high-quality connectivity by default.

In other words, where centralized VPNs collapse under weight, dVPNs are designed to thrive.

The case for choosing dVPNs over legacy VPNs

What exactly is a decentralized VPN?

At a glance, it looks familiar: you click “connect” in an app and your traffic gets rerouted. But under the hood, the mechanics are completely different.

Instead of relying on a central company’s servers, dVPNs are peer-to-peer networks. Every participant — whether an individual user or a dedicated node operator — can contribute bandwidth to the network. Traffic is then routed through multiple independent nodes (multi-hop), making it far more difficult to trace.

This architecture unlocks three key advantages:

1. Censorship resistance. Because there is no single kill switch, authorities cannot simply block a handful of servers to cripple the network.
2. Transparency. Open-source code and reproducible builds mean users can see exactly how the service works — a real answer to the empty “no logs” claims of centralized VPNs.

“When someone says no logs, the right response is: show me the schema and server code.”
– Brien, CEO of URNetwork

3. Participation. Users are not just customers; they can also become providers, earning rewards for contributing capacity.

Another thing is, dVPNs aren’t entirely new. Projects like Orchid and Mysterium have been experimenting in this space for years.

Orchid built a token-powered marketplace for bandwidth but struggled to scale its network because participation wasn’t always safe or sustainable. Mysterium has assembled a large global node count but faces challenges in mainstream adoption. Deeper Network adds hardware devices to the mix, while KelVPN focuses heavily on anonymity guarantees.

Each of these projects proves the potential (but also the complexity) of building decentralized privacy tools.

A look at URNetwork, a privacy-first VPN 🌍

One of the dVPNs we’re familiar with (and excited to see grow!) is URnetwork.

We’ve done due diligence on their project through Verified Projects by DePIN Hub, and honestly: we speculate that they may be the VPN upgrade the internet’s been waiting for…

URnetwork’s design starts with safety.

As Brien explained to us, Orchid, for example, struggled because running a node wasn’t safe enough for participants; and if a project’s users don’t feel secure, the network just simply never grows.

URnetwork was built to solve that. The network uses a multi-hop, peer-to-peer architecture by default, with an industry-low user-to-node ratio of about 5:1.

Another innovation is their performance auction protocol, which distributes traffic dynamically across available nodes to prevent bottlenecks. Combined with multi-hop routing, this makes URnetwork harder to censor while keeping speeds competitive with (and in many cases better than!) centralized VPNs.

📱 Everyday users are welcome!

Here’s the kicker: you don’t even need to be a crypto pro to use URnetwork.

• Free tier: ~30GB/day to test-drive.
• Premium: just $5/month.
• Platforms: iOS, Android, even Solana dApp integrations.

It feels like any other VPN app, but under the hood, it’s a decentralized network with way more upside.

💰 But digging deeper, if real rewards matter to you just as much as quality connection, it gets even-freaking-better

For those who are crypto-native, participation is straightforward.

Providers who share bandwidth are rewarded weekly in USDC, paid out on Solana or Polygon. That’s a rare and important distinction in a DePIN project.

Of course, URnetwork is still early. Adoption is small compared to big-name VPNs, the free tier UX is still being smoothed out, and third-party audits will matter for their “hard privacy” claims.

But that’s also the opportunity. You’re not reading about something hypothetical — you can download URnetwork today, try it out, and even earn from it.

Strengths and gaps across dVPNs

Zooming back out, the decentralized VPN space as a whole brings a lot to the table.

They’re an upgraded version of what current VPNs can do: privacy is built into the design, censorship is much harder to enforce, and participation means you can actually earn instead of just paying for access.

That’s a huge leap compared to the “trust us, no logs” approach of traditional providers!

But the bigger story is that dVPNs are still untested at scale. ⚖

Can they hold up when millions — or billions — of humans and AI agents flood the network?

Can they convince users outside of crypto that decentralized privacy is worth the switch?

And can they survive regulators who are already cracking down on VPNs in places like Russia and India?

The truth is, the space is exciting precisely because of these unknowns. dVPNs aren’t a polished finish line — they’re an evolving experiment to rebuild internet privacy from the ground up.

The next era of private browsing! 🌐

The VPN model we’ve all used is showing its cracks. Servers get seized. Ads promise “no logs” with nothing to back it up. And the more people pile in? The worse the service gets.

dVPNs flip that story. They scale with users. They’re transparent by design. And they actually reward the people who help make them work.

The numbers aren’t small either. The VPN industry is already worth tens of billions and racing toward half a trillion over the next decade. Even if decentralized VPNs capture a fraction of that, it’s massive. We’re talking one of the most explosive shifts in digital infrastructure.

URnetwork is just one example of how this can play out. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s real, it’s live, and it shows what happens when privacy and participation finally click together!

So here’s the question: the next time you reach for a VPN, do you want to keep renting access… or do you want to own a piece of the network itself?