GIP-129 Update #2
Introduction
As part of GIP-129, we have set up a committee to help govern the entity in charge of running and supporting GnosisVPN. The three member committee consists of one member from HOPR (@botanical on this forum), one from Gnosis Ltd. (@filoozom), and one from the DAO (@staworth).
This is the second update by the committee.
Maelcum Inc
Maelcum Inc’s Panamanian legal representation Pacifica Legal submitted the first accounting report for Maelcum Inc on April 22nd, to cover the 2025 financial year. This is a regulatory requirement under Panamanian law and was straightforward as for the period in question Maelcum Inc had no income or assets and conducted no operations. This will naturally change for next year when we submit for 2026.
Dakota Payment Platform
Registration with the Dakota Payment Platform is ongoing. Their support has been slow to respond and this hasn’t been pushed as it is currently not urgent. This will be pushed by a non-committee team member within HOPR over the coming weeks.
Gnosis VPN Website
The committee Safe controls the domain vpn.gnosis.eth.limo, used to host the Gnosis VPN landing site. This is currently a minimal information page which also serves as a sign up point to the testing pool and provides access to the self-onboarding platform for accepted testers.
VPN testing showed that many users were put off or confused by being directed to a GitHub releases page, so it was decided to create a separate downloads page containing the latest releases. This page is also used by the self-onboarding tool if users have chosen to proceed anonymously or are completing the onboarding feedback on a different device than they are running the VPN. The subdomain https://downloads.vpn.gnosis.eth.limo/ was created for this purpose.
The transaction registering this subdomain can be found here.
Due to the high frequency of releases for Gnosis VPN in the initial testing period, it was not feasible to rely on the committee process to update the content registry containing the IPFS hash for this downloads page. Since a mismatch between the current release and the download page could cause confusion and disruption for testers, we decided to change the controller role for this subdomain to an address controlled by the HOPR products team. This allows the record to be updated quickly as part of HOPR’s release process.
The transaction registering this role assignment can be found here.
This assignment only applies to the downloads subdomain. It is expected this will be reverted to the committee Safe once VPN access opens up and release frequency slows down.
Infrastructure Transfer
In our last update we stated that the transfer of infrastructure currently controlled by Gnosis Ltd, particularly the Gnosis VPN exit nodes, would be one of the next things to occur. As testing is currently at a critical stage, it was decided to leave these nodes running at Gnosis Ltd a while longer. Within Gnosis, it is easier to spin up new nodes and quickly deploy new versions of the exit client and hoprd as needed. It is also easier to monitor node performance and costs and experiment with efficiency versus performance. We thank Gnosis Ltd for their ongoing provision of these services.
Outlook
Gnosis VPN has been shown at DappCon 2026. You can read more in the VPN update here. Now that DappCon 2026 is over and testing expands, it will be more important to begin preparations for the decentralization of the exit nodes and other steps to decouple from operating wholly within HOPR and Gnosis Ltd. For now we are satisfied with the progress that has been made.