Privacy and DePIN-focused project, ANyONe Protocol, has recently unveiled its roadmap in an X post shared on Friday. It unveils the full set of technical updates that they intend to release, from updates to their DePIN client to mass hardware sales.
Anyone is at the forefront of one of the biggest global issues – internet privacy – aiming to return trust back for the millions of internet users who feel increasingly tracked and monetized online. Unlike traditional VPNs, Anyone is building a trustless privacy layer for the internet, tunnelling traffic through chained VPN tunnels controlled by different people in a decentralized network and thus ensuring no entity can track users’ activity.
Their privacy network – Anon – is a global DePIN utilizing a novel Arweave distribution protocol to incentivize node (or ‘relay’) operators in real time for contributing bandwidth. Any operator with suitable hardware can run a node, but Anyone have also released their device – the Anyone Router – for non-technical users.
The roadmap as released outlines how the Anyone team intends to build on this foundation, dividing the set of milestones into three parallel streams (Network Development, Protocol & Token, Hardware Development). This presentation highlights the number of concurrent engineering teams Anyone maintains, most of whom build completely open source, as well as their characteristic development speed.
Since they were removed from the Tor network in November 2023, the Anyone team has worked swiftly to create their own, more mainstream-focused onion routing network, forking the Tor network for every OS and releasing their hardware device for global shipping in just a few months. Their new roadmap lays out the upgrades that will solidify this competitive advantage and scale both network supply and demand.
Notable features include Anon SDK updates, with the plan to release Typescript, NPM, Python and mobile libraries. This comprehensive release will allow a wide range of developers to interface their applications directly with the network without needing to interact with Anon’s native-C client. It sets the stage for a wide ecosystem of privacy-focused projects and hackathons, and puts Anyone in the realms of other developer-active projects such as LINK and ANKR.
The protocol rollout is also of interest, with the ‘transition to AO’ revealing a previously unknown link between Anyone and Arweave’s much-touted ‘global computer’ AO. With senior developer Jim Toth, co-author to Arweave’s atomic-assets standard, leading their protocol, a deeper integration with the permaweb was always on the card and this roadmap point is a hint at what is to come.
Relay operators may find the new testnet rollout plan of interest, particularly the introduction of new reward metrics such as geolocation and uptime – both of which hint at a push for a wider number of relay operators as opposed to concentrated, well-resourced ones. The geolocation point in particular bears some resemblance to Helium $HNT, who reserved higher rewards for operators in less competitive locations. With the co-founder of Helium, Sean Carey, advising the project, more parallels are certainly likely.
Later protocol roadmap points focus more on token function, with decentralized bandwidth authorities accompanied by ‘delegated staking for authorities’. As both the distribution testnet and this potential new staking feature go live, it would see far more utility and usage for the Anyone token.
Perhaps most intriguing are some of the later network milestones – ‘Enterprise custom circuit control’ and ‘AI circuit agents’. Both point to a far more sophisticated mechanism for users to route traffic through the network, and the mention of AI in particular opens a lot of questions around how much onion routing could be improved with the ability to optimize. Both sharply contrast the more rigid approach seen in other privacy protocols, but with Tor contributors such as Benjamin Erhart incentivized to join the project, it could be the jumpstart the privacy space needs to hit the mainstream.
Finally, with a long waiting list for the next batch of Anyone hardware routers, onlookers will be relieved to see a mass-hardware sale on the cards.
The significance of this rollout is yet to be fully realized and will likely be reinforced as it begins to get implemented. The new whitepaper will be released shortly, according to their latest AMA, to bring these parallel points together into the cohesive vision of privacy for Anyone.
