Martti “Sirius” Malmi — one of Bitcoin’s earliest developers who worked with Satoshi Nakamoto (he received Bitcoin’s first-ever transaction and later maintained bitcoin.org) — has released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that abandons the conventional VPN trust model in favor of cryptographic keys, decentralized relays, and user-run exit nodes.
The release was flagged on X by TFTC (@TFTC21) on May 19 and the project’s code is available in the public repository at git.iris.to. Built on the Nostr protocol as its signaling and coordination layer, Nostr VPN swaps corporate servers and centralized logging for a peer-to-peer architecture that relies on public-key cryptography — the same primitives that secure Bitcoin.
What’s wrong with traditional VPNs?
- Commercial VPNs (NordVPN, ExpressVPN, ProtonVPN, etc.) route all user traffic through infrastructure they own and control. Users must trust those companies not to log, analyze, sell, or hand over data to third parties or law enforcement.
- That trust has been breached repeatedly: several providers marketed as “no-log” have later been shown to retain logs when legally compelled, undermining the promise of privacy.
- A conventional VPN’s privacy guarantees are only as strong as a company’s legal status, employees, and obligations in the jurisdictions where it operates.
How Nostr VPN is different
- No central servers. Nostr VPN forms a peer-to-peer mesh in which devices connect directly to one another rather than tunneling through a corporate intermediary.
- Cryptographic identities. Users are identified by key pairs rather than accounts or email addresses tied to real identities; signaling and coordination are handled over Nostr relays.
- User-operated exit nodes. Instead of relying on a provider’s shared exit servers, a user chooses one of their own machines (a home server, a rented VPS such as Hetzner, or any device they control) as the network’s exit point. Web services see only the exit node’s IP, and there’s no third-party operator that can be subpoenaed to produce logs because no such operator holds them.
Why Malmi’s involvement matters
Nostr VPN’s design echoes the same anti-intermediary philosophy that informed Bitcoin’s founding: remove trusted middlemen that create single points of failure and control. Nostr’s roots in the Bitcoin community — and its use of the same public-key crypto primitives — make it a natural fit for developers and users prioritizing censorship resistance, self-custody, and decentralized infrastructure.
Timing and significance
The update arrives amid growing regulatory attention to VPNs — with jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom moving to tighten controls and expand surveillance capabilities. For privacy-focused users, builders, and crypto-native communities that see financial privacy and internet privacy as inseparable, Nostr VPN represents a practical step toward infrastructure that can’t be compelled to betray users simply because there is no centralized operator to compel.
Read the code and follow developments at the project’s repo: git.iris.to (as flagged by TFTC on X).
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
