The State of AnzenVPN: Recap on the StrongNode Year-End Update

Infrastructure-as-a-Service technology company StrongNode.io CEO and Co-founder Daniel Saito attended the year-end video AMA episode for the StrongNode community. The video AMA session happened on 20 December 2022. CEO Daniel answered questions from the community and gave the latest updates on StrongNode, AnzenVPN development updates, and more.

Read on to see some highlights of the StrongNode year-end video AMA episode hosted by Timo:

Timo: AJ: Hey Everyone, thanks for joining us for this end of year community wrap up. I’m AJ Timo And with us today is Daniel Saito, StrongNode CEO and co-founder. How are you doing today, Daniel?

Daniel Saito: Hello! I’m doing well, Thank you very much. It’s getting cold and the market conditions are choppy, but we’re all hanging in there one way or another.

Do you want to give the community a general update on what StrongNode’s been up to for 2022?

Daniel: Sure! StrongNode has been in deep development as we’ve been working on solutions around our VPN product line. We are calling our decentralized VPN solution “Anzen VPN” and it’s the first decentralized solution that’s running on OpenVPN 3.0. It’s actually a first of its kind on the OpenVPN platform, and we’re really excited about how it’s rolling out, And we have early builds around this. This is something that we wanted to address to our community.

But do you think you could go into a little more detail about what ends in VPN is maybe for starters, what makes a decentralized VPN? In other words, how do you put the “D” in “dVPN”?

Daniel: Well, the decentralized aspect is that anyone can become a node and anyone can be an on-ramp and off-ramp for privacy in that sense. And one of the tenants that we wanted to actually establish for Web3 and our goal is to actually be able to provide user privacy. And in order to do user privacy, we want to have secured connections. And if you saw Web 2.0 when it first started out, a lot of the Internet connections or our browser connections were mainly viewable by HTTP.

But in the latter half of Web 2.0, we saw a, you know, the community or the the large companies saying that, well, we need security and and not only e-commerce shopping carts should have HTTPS, but we should enforce it throughout all connections. And so what we saw at the end of Web 2.0 was that if it’s using Apple based products or Facebook or Google, they strictly enforce these tabs. Well, when we start Web 3.0, one thing that we want to do is we want to actually get to the bottom system layer and make sure all your connections are private. And with the recent announcements of, let’s say, Metamask, for example, of how they collect IP addresses and then VPN will actually mitigate that, that attack vector or that sensor vector where they can actually log your IP for all the transactions you do at your Metamask wallet. And in that sense we believe in user privacy. What you do is your business and how you transact with your wallet and in your form, decentralized finance. This basically obfuscates your connection with other connections using this map, this huge, large mesh network that we’re creating.

What makes Anzen VPN stand out from some of the potential competition in the future?

Daniel: Well, what we’re rolling out is, is the de facto aspect of just user privacy. And I think being able to to do the legwork of infrastructure (being that we have the StrongNode Edge Network), and being able to first establish a network connection and seeing who’s out there and who wants to participate in this network. And by establishing a layer of privacy and security and deep encryption at a protocol level to TCP IP, this allows for people to communicate without censorship. And as we’re seeing with a lot of large, big tech companies, they are choosing who they want to ban and how they want to limit connections based off of regions and locations. One thing that we want to do is we want to break everyone free and be able to be wherever they want, however they want through anyone in that sense who’s participating [in] the network.

How could people get involved with this? Will there be any kind of a sign up to test this out?

Daniel: Right. If you go to strongnode.io, we have a signup button for early access. And right now, we currently work on Windows, so we will be accepting users to have a Windows-based installation. And anyone that runs Windows, can actually run the software. And during this time, we are looking for bugs. And in this way, they are early testers of this software. And with this we want to be able to test the maximum throughput as well as the the latency within the network and be able to apply certain features like QoS and QoS will allow prioritized packets for, let’s say, gaming, for example. So if you want to have a private gaming session with your friends, this would be an opportune time to actually use it so you can actually accelerate your packets and prioritize in that sense.

Why make this the first StrongNode product readily available?

Daniel: Well, in order to know who’s out there and who’s actually using the software or who’s on a network, we need to establish a network connection to all the computers and hence the strategic choice is to connect everyone first. But you can’t just connect anyone to anyone for the sake [of] connecting people. If you’re going to do that, might as well have it as a secure connection. And so with this said, we want it to actually have a secure connection so we chose OpenVPN as that’s the standard in regards to secure connectivity as they’ve done it right, as an open source solution.

Back to the Anzen VPN signup, do you have any general outline of when we could get into that?

Daniel: Well, let’s see. Anzen VPN, I think we will be opening up early Alpha access around a January timeframe where we actually will be onboarding early users, investors, and the community members to help out and debug the solution.

Daniel: Right now, it’s currently only on Windows platforms. So if you have a Windows x64 or Windows 10, you can actually use our software … We’ll be putting the code over to Mac after we work through the bugs and the usability of course. And then and that’s the part of the code too, Mac, Linux, and then eventually mobile phones and this will apply both for storing it as well as audio.

Will the dVPN be available on iOS and Android devices?

Daniel: So right now, it’s windows based machines. it’s limited to Windows computers and connections since its working on the TCP stack on Windows. Later, we’ll fork this over to Mac and Linux and we’ll be able to work on anything, whether it’s Raspberry Pi or on your Mac or your Mac book. And eventually we’ll we’ll have it on mobile phones. The idea is to get it ported over to Mac and other platforms and as well as on mobile, because that’s where most people use a VPN.

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