Welcome to the next chapter of NordVPN
4 min read
Over the years, we’ve been asking people what they think a VPN is, why they use this service, and how it benefits them. While seemingly, VPN is pretty straightforward, their answers were not. For some, VPNs are tools that unlock access to a less restricted internet. For others, VPNs allow them to take control of their data. Yet another group relies on VPN in order to have an additional layer of security.
While many functions got regular mentions, at the end of the day, all of them relied on the benefits of an encrypted tunnel and a global network of servers. But we want NordVPN to be more than that. We don’t just want to encrypt your traffic and hide your IP address. Our goal is to make the secure option of using the internet the default one, where instead of you needing to do something to be secure, you would need to do something to become vulnerable.
And the internet is way more than just opening up websites on your browser. It’s also about having access to remote things. It’s about connecting to your home or work network, perhaps a game server using the same device. Or being able to easily craft your own custom connection over your own private VPN, anywhere in the world.
With this mission in mind, we dedicated the last two years to expanding the scope of our work. To not only encrypt your internet traffic and change your IP address but to make all your internet connections more secure. We also launched Threat Protection, a feature designed to stop any threats that come through your internet connection, be it through malicious websites or downloaded files.
Today, we’re introducing the next chapter of NordVPN.
Seamless file sharing
In this new chapter, NordVPN’s Meshnet lets you share files between your devices seamlessly. With this new addition, you can instantly transfer screenshots made on your mobile device to your laptop in three clicks. Without losing quality. Without uploading them to any third-party server. With them moving along an end-to-end encrypted tunnel. You can read more about this feature in our article on file sharing with Meshnet.
Right after the initial launch of Meshnet, people started sharing how they were using it. Everything from creating their private Minecraft server to setting up network protection using Pi-hole. In order to make the discovery of such use cases easier, we made a dedicated website and will continue to expand it in the future.
If you have been following NordVPN for some time now, you may already know how obsessed we are with speed. We don’t just aim to be fast; we want your connection with VPN to be faster than without it. So while working on Meshnet, we couldn’t settle on anything less than we had already built with NordVPN. In the coming weeks, we will introduce what we internally call kernel-to-kernel connections: peer-to-peer connections that can be faster than 1Gbps. You can read more details about how we achieved that in an article on kernel-to-kernel connections.
Going open-source
It wouldn’t be possible to achieve anything even close to that without one very special community — people who write open-source code. Like many software companies, we rely on tools written by people who make them available to all for free. Now, NordVPN is committing to be part of this community and share code, which we believe provides both benefits to those that will use it as well as transparency to those that seek it.
Today, we’ve made three important components of NordVPN software open-source: Libtelio (a core networking library of NordVPN used by all of our applications across all operating systems), Libdrop (a library we use to share files over Meshnet), and an entire NordVPN Linux application that wraps these components together and provides with easy interface for potential integrations. You can find more details about these changes in this article on our open-source commitment.
Making Meshnet free
Last but not least: we are making Meshnet a free feature. Now corporations gain access to your information in order to achieve something as simple as sending the file from point A to B. We strongly believe that this trajectory can only be changed by providing superior service for as many people as possible so they can feel the difference.
That’s why you won’t need a VPN subscription for Meshnet to work. Everything — from sharing files to hosting your Minecraft server to routing traffic through your home PC — is free for you to use. You can connect up to 10 of your own devices and up to 50 external devices in your Meshnet (for more information, check out our article on why Meshnet is free).
Having a free version, committing to open source, and building features that enable security and privacy in an entirely new way is what the next chapter of NordVPN is all about.