HOPR Proposes GnosisVPN
HOPR’s hectic development schedule hasn’t left much time for blogging recently, but here’s news that definitely deserves a post: HOPR has just made a proposal to GnosisDAO to develop GnosisVPN on top of HOPR in exchange for a $1.5m dollar investment.
The proposal is currently live in Phase 2 on the GnosisDAO forum, so please head over there to vote and participate in the discussion. Or read on to learn more about this monumental step on the HOPR roadmap.
The Importance of Full-stack Privacy
HOPR has always been an advocate for full stack privacy. Complicated on-chain privacy solutions are pointless if your RPC provider can link your supposedly unlinkable transactions using your IP address. That’s why we built RPCh, to decentralize and anonymize the infrastructure which underpins all of crypto. But even that is just one small part of the picture. When you go online to use a DeFi app, you’re not just connecting your wallet and making a transaction — you’re connecting to their API, downloading all the assets for their page and
And of course when you do this, you’re exposing all kinds of information about yourself, particularly your IP address. With zero-knowledge on-chain solutions and RPCh you may be able to conceal your on-chain transaction details, but if the DeFi service and your ISP can see you connecting at the exact timestamps of your “unlinkable” transactions, all that complicated work was for nothing.
VPNs are the obvious solution here. But current VPNs are beset with problems. They’re often fully centralized, with business models that raise questions about whether it’s your subscription which is paying the bills, or your data. Still worse are those which collaborate with governments to install backdoors, making the whole VPN pointless.
Even the best ones are engaged in a constant cat and mouse game with censors, who can easily block IPs associated with these services. A decentralized VPN based on HOPR’s mixnet would open up access to the coveted residential IP range, which is almost impossible to censor without shutting down the entire Internet.
Web3 needs a web3 VPN, one which is fully decentralized and resilient.
It’s also a major opportunity from the business side: The VPN market is huge. An estimated 31% of internet users (1.5 billion people) use a VPN, with 41% of those (680m) using one every day.
So why Gnosis? HOPR and Gnosis have a long-standing collaboration. The HOPR mixnet has lived on Gnosis Chain since our token launch, and no major web3 chain has more closely aligned values with HOPR, particularly Gnosis’ focus on the importance of individual node runners as the only way to provide truly resilient decentralized infrastructure.
Gnosis has always understood the importance of privacy, but there are currently no major players in the direct Gnosis ecosystem working on the problem of off-chain privacy. This makes HOPR a perfect fit to work on GnosisVPN.
Gnosis VPN Roadmap
Make no mistake, this is a much harder problem than we solved with RPCh. When you go online, you’ll be using a wide variety of data transport protocols, including HTTP, DNS, and UDP-based systems for situations where high-speed transfer is required, such as streaming.
To address these, the roadmap has been split into two phases. The first of these spans a twelve-month period to develop a proof of concept VPN focused solely on HTTP and web3 users.
The goal of this is to produce a browser extension which will allow people to access sites and services within the Gnosis Ecosystem (Cowswap, Safe, HOPR Staking Hub, etc.). This will be achieved via a whitelist in the first version. The reason to do this is to keep a tight control on loads while we scale up the throughput of the HOPR network.
What would this mean for HOPR and its node runners?
If the proposal passes, this would obviously have significant implications for HOPR: the $1.5m from this proposal would be HOPR’s largest investment to date, and would significantly extend HOPR’s runway. In exchange, Gnosis DAO would gain control of a significant share of the HOPR Association’s treasury.
Work on GnosisVPN would occupy the vast majority of the team’s time, What’s left will be dedicated to completing pre-existing grant obligations and maintaining the current infrastructure and systems.
We believe that GnosisVPN is the right direction for HOPR to take. HOPR’s roadmap has always included support for all kinds of data transport, and GnosisVPN is the next logical incremental step after RPCh.
It’s important to stress that GnosisVPN would be a service on top of the HOPR network. The HOPR token would not be affected. The HOPR network will always run on HOPR tokens and HOPR node runners will continue to be incentivized as before.
In addition, current HOPR node runners will receive 1 GNO so they can run a Gnosis Beacon Chain validator. More details on how to claim these and set up your validator will be released if and when the proposal passes Phase 3.
Nor will this affect HOPR Community Governance or the HOPR Community DAO Treasury. The tokens GnosisDAO would receive from this proposal would come from the HOPR Association’s treasury. However, this would make GnosisDAO a significant token holder in future HOPR Community governance. However, we believe that inter-DAO governance is a good thing for web3, and GnosisDAO is highly aligned with HOPR DAO’s own values. We also think it’s generally better for the largest investors in HOPR to be DAOs rather than VCs.
Nonetheless, this would still be the most consequential decision affecting HOPR since it was founded. In light of this, HOPR Association will be holding a temperature check vote for HOPR token holders on Snapshot. This is part of HOPR Association’s governance, not the HOPR Community Governance voted for in the most recent DAO experiment, so will just be a simple quadratic token vote rather than following the full HOPR Community governance processes.
What can you do?
This proposal is currently in Phase 2 on the Gnosis DAO forum. Please head over there, vote in the temperature check, and chime in to the discussion. Phase 2 is open for two weeks. If the proposal passes, it will move to Phase 3 which is on Snapshot. This vote is open only to GNO holders.
You can also comment on HOPR’s own forum, vote in the HOPR Association’s own temperature check, and attend the upcoming AMA between HOPR and Gnosis, which will be live on GnosisDAO’s YouTube channel at 6pm CET on 4th April.
We hope you’ll participate in this important milestone for HOPR and web3 privacy.
Dr. Sebastian Bürgel,
HOPR Founder
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Staking: https://stake.hoprnet.org
Bounties: https://bounties.hoprnet.org
Playground: https://playground.hoprnet.org
