GIP-98: Should GnosisDAO invest in HOPR to kickstart development of GnosisVPN?
- In Favour
- Against
GIP: 98
title: Should GnosisDAO invest in HOPR to kickstart development of GnosisVPN?
author: Sebastian Bürgel on behalf of HOPR Association
status: Draft
type: Funding
created: 2024-04-02
duration: 12 months
funding: $1.5m + 500 GNO
Abstract
To strengthen Gnosis’ positioning as a leader in resilient web3 infrastructure, GnosisDAO would invest into HOPR to foster Gnosis’ focus on privacy. HOPR would then build Gnosis VPN, a truly private and decentralized VPN on top of the HOPR mixnet. To increase Gnosis DAO’s oversight, this effort will be split into two: this proposal and a follow up proposal for further development after initial work has been presented within 9 months.
Within the framework of this first proposal, HOPR would build a set of VPN (virtual private network) libraries for privately relaying HTTP calls and responses and a proof of concept Gnosis VPN browser extension. Working over the HOPR mixnet, this first extension will give users fully metadata-private access to a set of predefined Gnosis Dapps from their web browsers. In particular, this will allow users to interact with a full suite of crypto services without revealing their IP address or geolocation to the respective web servers.
These libraries and proof of concept browser extension would be supported with an investment of $1.5m to form the basis for GnosisVPN, a fully decentralized VPN service tailored to web3 users. The scaling and UX work needed to bridge these two versions would be the subject of a future proposal, contingent on the successful completion of the deliverables in this proposal.
In addition to the product development, GnosisDAO will receive HOPR tokens at a 30% discount on the 90-day $HOPR TWAP, ending on the day the proposal passes for their $1.5m investment.
The State of Web3 Privacy
Despite broad consensus that privacy is a fundamental component of a functional and scalable web3, privacy is still an underexplored area of development compared to other core web3 values such as decentralization.
The most prominent privacy-adjacent developments in web3 today focus on zero-knowledge. Indeed, GnosisDAO has funded significant work in this area. This is important work, but much zero knowledge research is focused on trustlessness rather than privacy, and even where privacy is the focus, it is often overlooked that on-chain privacy is just one component of web3 privacy. Off-chain privacy is as, if not moreso, important. There’s little point in engaging in complicated cryptography to unlink your on-chain history, only to expose your activity through website metadata. On-chain and off-chain privacy need to be developed in tandem.
Off-chain privacy solutions do exist, of course. The VPN market is large and booming, currently estimated at $45b globally a year, and predicted to rise to $350b a year by 2032. An estimated 31% of internet users (1.5 billion people) use a VPN, with 41% of those (680m) using one every day. Gnosis would benefit greatly from tapping into this market.
But current VPNs have unacceptable trust assumptions, requiring users to trust a single centralized server which sees every user connection and associated metadata. To be safe and private, web3 users need a web3 VPN.
GnosisVPN
GnosisVPN would be a VPN on top of the HOPR mixnet. A series of entry and exit nodes would allow the local client to send and receive arbitrary data while obscuring user metadata, most significantly their IP address. This will provide far superior trust assumptions for users than regular VPNs or alternative mixnets such as Tor.
Specifically:
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Unlike standard VPNs, Gnosis VPN will be a decentralized service where users connect their entry node to any of a set of decentralized exit nodes. Different exit nodes can be used for different requests, so there is no centralized point to link user data. Unlike VPNs, exit nodes would not see the user’s true IP address or other data (only that of the previous node in the route).
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Unlike Tor, HOPR’s relay protocol needs only one honest mix-node on a relay route. Even if all the rest of the nodes collude, privacy still cannot be broken.
First Phase Development
Building a full VPN service is a hard problem. Although HOPR has successfully solved the problem of metadata-private RPC calls, a typical user’s online interactions will touch many different protocols and systems, including HTTP, DNS, and UDP-based services such as streaming apps.
There is also the problem of latency and throughput. Modern ad-heavy websites are not optimized for low bandwidth, and mixnets are susceptible to overload either through inadvertent overuse or deliberate denial of service attacks.
For these reasons the first phase of development would focus on relaying HTTP requests only, and use a whitelisted set of Gnosis dapp domains such as app.safe.global, swap.cow.fi, gnosisscan.io, etc to minimize throughput and mitigate the risks of overloading. This first version will already allow Gnosis users to interact privately with a full range of crypto and web3 services.
Project Deliverables
This project would focus on technical development of a set of libraries for private HTTP relaying (pHTTP) and a proof-of-concept browser extension, to be delivered within a timeframe of 9 months. Future work, including improvements, scaling, support for different transport protocols, business development, marketing, etc., would be addressed in a future proposal contingent on success.
Deliverable 1.1 pHTTP technical design
- pHTTP technical design of protocol and components
Deliverable 1.2 JS client library
- Implementation of pHTTP protocol in JS SDK
Deliverable 1.3 Implementation of exit and entry components
- Implementation of entry node which connect pHTTP client with exit node
- Implementation of exit node which performs HTTP requests and sends responses to entry node
Deliverable 1.4 pHTTP web-browser extension (PoC)
- Implementation of web-browser extension which routes HTTP requests via pHTTP
- Single browser target
- Whitelisted set of supported web apps
- Limited documentation, configuration and UI
Deliverable 1.5 Performance improvements in HOPRd to enable pHTTP
- General availability of performance improvements in HOPRd within new releases
- Improved mixer throughput from currently 2 packets/s to 20 packets/s
Project Timeline
The proposed start of this first phase of the project is from the moment the proposal is voted upon and executed. The project will run for 9 months. Development will be fully Free and Open Source, and progress reports will be provided to GnosisDAO on a quarterly basis.
If the project is successful, a second proposal will be made to fund work to build the full version of GnosisVPN over a duration of 24 months. To improve accountability and oversight of Gnosis DAO that second phase will be subject to a separate proposal and voting process.
About HOPR
HOPR is a Swiss-based project building privacy infrastructure for web3. The HOPR network is a mixnet which uses proof-of-relay to incentivize relay nodes using the HOPR token.
HOPR has been active since 2020 and launched its HOPR token in February 2021. HOPR’s mixnet is fully functional, and currently has over 400 active relaying nodes. Of these, fewer than 5% are run by the HOPR team.
HOPR has a longstanding relationship with Gnosis. The HOPR network is incentivized using the HOPR token on Gnosis Chain. HOPR’s staking and node management tools are built on top of Safe.
To date, HOPR has focused on data transport issues narrowly related to crypto infrastructure and transactions. In 2022, HOPR conducted research in collaboration with Gnosis to highlight potential privacy issues related to validator sniping on Gnosis Beacon Chain.
HOPR’s recent focus has been on building RPC-over-HOPR, a fully private service to connect users to RPC providers, without those providers being able to see their personal metadata.
These are important problems to have solved, but of course interacting with web3 services involves significantly more data transfer than just transactions themselves. Simply interacting with websites exposes a significant amount of identifiable and linkable metadata, most notably your IP address.
To solve this problem, HOPR intends to expand its scope from private crypto transactions to providing privacy for all web3 data transfer. This will require a significant but achievable increase in the throughput of the HOPR network, both globally and at the node-level.
Funding and Team
HOPR is requesting $1.5m to fund this project. 100% of this will go to fund developer salaries. In exchange, GnosisDAO will receive HOPR tokens at a 30% discount, based on the 90-day TWAP ending on the day of this proposal being voted upon.
HOPR has a streamlined, purely tech-focused team consisting of 9 full time engineers who work exclusively on HOPR. All team members and their work can be found in the respective repositories of the following GitHub organizations:
In addition, to strengthen the link between the Gnosis and HOPR infrastructure ecosystems, 500 GNO will be made available to HOPR nodes running at the time this proposal is published on the Gnosis DAO forum. Each node will be eligible to receive 1 GNO to run a Gnosis Beacon Chain validator. Node runners will receive their GNO by submitting their validator and HOPR node addresses to an online anonymous form. The HOPR network currently has over 500 active nodes, of which <10% are run by team members.
