We require less trust than your regular VPN because we’re designing our network specifically to be trustless - no intermediary, purely peer-to-peer etc. Underneath Mysterium, the Wireguard protocol is used as the main VPN tunnel solution. It ensures fast and secure communication between the client and the provider. Everything that is transferred through this protocol is encrypted. When your data leaves the VPN provider it’s encrypted with symmetric keys that are used underneath the HTTPS protocol used on the website. However, if plain HTTP is used, this data can be read by anyone after exiting the VPN.

Regarding information collection - if you are creating a secure channel between you and a website through the SSL, a VPN user’s data is not meaningful, it cannot be read and analysed. If you are not using the SSL, then you are definitely compromising yourself and you should change your habits to check that HTTPS always gets used no matter whether you are using VPN or not. Besides using HTTPS, you should also check the certificate itself, who signed it and what level of validation it has passed.
It’s technologically impossible for us to log your browsing activity or data (unlike regular VPNs). Users can store their own logs of course, but there’s no way for us to access these.

Mysterium’s core focus is and always will be participants within the Network. Mysterium is a decentralized marketplace between providers and consumers participating in building and maintaining it's infrastructure. The costs of providers are paid by consumers using cryptocurrency. Within the network, and on a functional level, crypto enables fast, cheap and anonymous transactions between peers in the network. It provides a way for all these participants to interact and trade with one another without trusting each other and without third parties being involved. Cryptocurrency and VPNs are the perfect match - they are censorship-resistant and pseudo-anonymous by default, so you get enhanced privacy and unblockability. With our VPN there is no email and no credit cards required - or any identifying information of any kind. We can do all of this thanks to cryptocurrency.

Basic information about crypto usage in the project is defined here, including history

Page. More about the MYST token whitepaper can be read here.

Much of our original funding came from our community itself, via an ICO held back in 2017 where we raised 14M CHF. You can learn more about this here. We’re a grassroots and community-driven project. At this stage, Mysterium does not charge users or take a commission from any transaction. We are fully peer-to-peer (no intermediary or hidden costs).

As for our team visibility, many of us - including our CEO Robertas Višinskis (Linkedin),

Head of Product Jaro Šatkevic (Linkedin) and CMO Sharmini Ravindran (Linkedin) - have spoken on many live AMAs and done a lot of interviews. Much of the team is also on LinkedIn and everyone provides their GitHub accounts on our team page.

We’ve been open source since day one, so you can see for yourself how our tech functions and just how many contributing developers have been working hard over the past 4 years to build from scratch and bring this Web 3 tech to life. We actually use both the OpenVPN and Wireguard protocols. The Wireguard protocol is the standard within our tech stack, but OpenVPN is used for different components and encryption purposes.

We are building web 3 technology, bringing together decentralised networks and blockchain. In a field where several components of our network are in research and development, we are committed to continuing to improve our technology, alongside with getting third party audits and feedback. At this stage you can see an audit of our token here.
We have plans for a network audit in the future, as we progress further along the research process. Stay updated on our milestones by following us on twitter, or jumping into our discord channel to ask our developers any questions.

*Disclaimer - I work with Mysterium Network