A VPN that never asks who you are
Accounts are the part of a VPN that leaks. Here is what changes when a Monero address replaces the signup form, and what stays exactly the same.
Every mainstream VPN asks for an email address. That single field quietly recreates the problem the VPN was supposed to solve: a database that maps a person to an IP address at a point in time. Payment records, renewal reminders and support tickets all hang off it.
What an account actually stores
An account record is not one row. It is the signup form, the billing history, the device list, the last login, the ticket you opened when the app misbehaved, and the marketing consent you clicked without reading. Any one of those is enough to answer the question a court, an employer or a data broker is really asking: who was behind this connection?
Removing logging from the tunnel does not help if the front door still writes your name down.
The wallet is the account, minus the identity
A Monero address is a public address and a key you hold. There is no profile attached to it, no recovery email, no name. When you open the app, the wallet signs a short message and the server checks the signature. The signature proves you control the address; it does not say who you are.
That gives the same affordance an account gives you — a way to come back to your quota, your exits and your balance — without a record that links a human to a session.
What we keep, and what we cannot keep
- Kept: the address, the balance it holds, the daily byte counter and the list of devices you bound to it. All of that is already public on the chain or owned by your key.
- Not kept: browsing destinations, DNS queries, connection start and end times, IP-in to IP-out pairs.
- Cannot be produced later: anything we never wrote down. There is no hidden table waiting for a subpoena.
Paying without a paper trail
Funds settle in XMR. A card payment through an onramp leaves the processor holding a record, which is fine if you only care about the tunnel and not the receipt. Paying directly from a wallet avoids even that.
The free tier exists so the second option is never a paywall: 30 GB a day, refreshed on the wallet, no top-up required.
Where the wallet model is weaker
Honesty matters more than marketing. A web wallet is only as private as the device it sits on; browser extensions can read what you see. A wallet linked to a verified exchange withdrawal carries that link with it. And a signature message is a cryptographic event — reuse the same address everywhere and you have built the identifier yourself.
The fix is ordinary hygiene: a wallet per context, a browser profile per wallet, and a habit of not mixing a work address with a personal one.
The short version
You do not need an account to buy privacy. You need a key, a balance and a tunnel that forgets you when the session ends. That is the entire design.