Portals

Portals is a decentralized VPN. Decentralization technology ensures users cannot be tracked (logged) in a central location by a single entity (e.g. VPN company).

Portals operates on top of peer-2-peer network of independent computers operated by unaffiliated people – a decentralized virtual private network, or dVPN for short. These computers run a piece of dVPN network software called node and serve as gateways into the Internet. Most of those computers are simple home computers or other devices (e.g. Raspberry Pi). Nodes running at home are called residential nodes and are providing residential IP service, which is great at unblocking restricted content. Another type of node is datacenter, in case node runner decides to run node on the datacenter, which is great for high speeds.

Things you can do with Portals

• Avoid centralized logs
• Unlock content with residential IPs
• Hide from gov, corps, and your ISP
• Secure connection when using public Wifi
• Stream geo-restricted content
• Use VPN on 10 devices at the same time

All centralized VPNs (we call them legacy VPNs) pass your traffic through the servers they control and monitor (imagine how much historical logs data they (might) have). Therefore despite their claims VPN user is forced to constantly trust the good intentions of the company AND their staff (e.g. system administrators, software developers etc.) not to peak at your browsing activity, keep logs or at worst – expose your logs data, browsing logs to 3rd parties.

There were multiple instances where VPN claims of not logging were proven to be false and had huge negative consequences to the users (read here, here and here).

At Portals dVPN technology is designed to disable any single organization (e.g. Portals organization itself) of getting any access to activity logs.

Conceptually VPN vs dVPN is as different as downloading sensitive files from central servers (e.g. google drive / dropbox) vs downloading files from BitTorrent network (which is a peer-to-peer file sharing technology).