Overview
NABU VPN is a Virtual Private Network that lets you pay for online privacy with a crypto wallet instead of an account. You connect a wallet, top up time in ADA, and download a profile that encrypts your internet traffic and hides your real IP address. There is no email, no signup form, and no password to remember.
The service runs on Cardano and is built by Blink Labs, an established Cardano infrastructure team. The website, smart contracts, indexer, and server setup are all open source across five public GitHub repositories1.
Key Features
- Wallet as your account. Sign in by connecting a Cardano wallet — no email, username, or password. Your wallet's identity is the only thing the service knows about you, and there is no signup form to fill out1.
- Pay-as-you-go in ADA. Buy VPN time in Cardano's native currency (ADA) directly from your wallet, with no monthly subscription. You can stop paying any time — there is no card on file to cancel and no recurring charge to chase2.
- Built to keep no logs. The OpenVPN servers run with logging turned off, the part of the service that reads on-chain payments does not record user IP addresses, and the front-door servers and storage are set to keep no access logs either3.
- Open code, open infrastructure. The website, smart contracts, server image, and cloud setup are published across five public repositories under the Blink Labs GitHub organization, so anyone can read how the service is wired together rather than trusting a marketing claim1.
- Profile download you control. After payment, you sign a short wallet message to authenticate, then download an OpenVPN configuration file you can import into any OpenVPN-compatible client on your device3.
What to Expect
You land on a homepage that asks you to connect a Cardano wallet — the same kind of wallet you would use to hold ADA or interact with browser wallets elsewhere on Cardano. From there, you pick how much VPN time you want, sign a transaction to pay in ADA, and the site generates a configuration file for you to download.
There is no first-party app for iPhone or desktop, so you import the configuration file into an OpenVPN client that runs on your device. The install guide walks through OpenVPN Connect on Android from Google Play; on other platforms, any OpenVPN-compatible app will accept the same file.
Once the connection is up, NABU VPN behaves like any other VPN: your traffic is encrypted between your device and the server, and your real IP is hidden from the websites you visit. The trade-off worth knowing about up front is that subscription records — the wallet that paid, the plan, the region — live on Cardano and are therefore public, even though the wallet is not directly tied to your name or email. The project's privacy policy spells this out alongside the no-log posture for traffic data2.
