Everyone is thinking about VPNs wrong

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Sebastian Buergel

Type: Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

I’ll explain the fundamental role VPNs play in digital privacy, while explaining how every group, from users to regulators, misunderstands them. - Billions of VPN users don’t see how current VPNs make attacks easier. Most VPNs claim a deceptive level of privacy and censorship resistance - Builders haven’t come to grips with the privacy challenges of web3. Much Ethereum infrastructure is still vulnerable to attacks enabled by IP leakage - Governments are regulating VPNs in ways that won’t work, creating huge data honeypots Privacy maxis are nerd-sniped by on-chain cryptographic approaches, but metadata leaks render them pointless - The huge VPN market (25% of all Internet users, $90b yearly) is an overlooked source of protocol revenue and new users A demo will show what data can still be logged, even over a maximally private VPN, to provide an honest picture of the privacy frontier. I’ll explain how a decentralized, mixnet-based approach to VPNs can actually benefit all these groups.