Introduction

Executive Summary

Privacy as a global issue has grown in awareness over the past decade, but our personal information continues to get tracked, profiled, and monetized at a growing rate. To reverse this trend and return the human right to privacy online, Anyone is building a new privacy layer for the internet – the Anyone network. Compared to VPNs, which merely shift the privacy bottleneck to its own centralized servers, Anyone uses multi-hop anonymized routing to ensure that no single participant is able to track an individual’s online activity. Furthermore, rather than placing the burden of privacy on the end user, the Anyone network can be integrated into both existing and new applications with minimal code changes. Anyone aims to create a paradigm shift by changing expectations around privacy in apps – no longer an afterthought, but an integral part of every product.

Using the network, either as a user or as an integrated application, relies on the operation of a light client that encrypts all traffic with multiple keys, that are each decrypted and forwarded by different servers. Consequently, Anyone’s privacy layer relies on a DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure) of nodes around the world, known as relays, that continually decrypt, encrypt, and forward these packets to other relays and onto the eventual destination site. To scale and meet the needs of a critical mass of users, a well provisioned and distributed DePIN network is critical. Anyone aims to implement this by lowering the barriers to participation as a relay and by building a reward layer that takes advantage of web3 to build an adaptive, load balancing token incentive system. We are here to spark a global movement and build the largest privacy network in the world.

Running a Relay

Operating a relay involves running a modified version of the Anyone client. Compared to the majority of crypto mining protocols, the requirements to run an Anyone relay are relatively low and rely more on contributing network bandwidth than CPU or GPU power. This makes it executable on a wide range of machines, including household devices. Instead of raw power, a relay’s effectiveness is a function of its reliability – high and consistent uptime – and its bandwidth – total data throughput per second.

The network’s privacy guarantee comes from the fact that each server in the multi-hop circuit is administered by a different person, such that no single participant can infer user activity. To keep this promise, having a large number of relay operators and building mechanisms to prevent sybil attacks are key. Additionally, diversity in the network yields additional benefits – traffic is more secure when there is no bottleneck at the ISP level, and well dispersed relays allow more clients to build circuits with less latency.

Reward Determinants

Each relay has a unique identifier, known as its fingerprint, which can be allocated relay rewards to be claimed by the fingerprint’s EVM wallet. Like in the previous iteration, the basis of a relay’s rewards is a value known as ‘consensus weight’. This is a score assigned to each relay by network authorities that represents a relay’s measured bandwidth, adjusted up and down based on cumulative measurements. Consensus weight is an effective load balancing metric for directing client traffic. However, it will not be the only determinant for relay token rewards. A proportion of rewards will be allocated based on other factors such as uptime and relay type, as well as a set of reward multipliers that scale net rewards based on geolocation, relay families and more. These additional incentive types allow the network to finetune its criteria for an effective relay and strategically drive growth.

Finally, a key evolution planned for the network is the introduction of ‘premium circuits’. The most in-demand relays will become accessible only to users who pay $ANYONE tokens to subscribe to them, allowing high-throughput and enterprise applications to pay to maintain service quality. This will bring in net revenue both to the premium relays themselves and the network as a whole.

Hardware Relays

The Anyone Router is the hardware device built specifically for the Anyone network. It is a single board computer flashed with a specialized image and assembled with a custom PCB, encryption chip and network interfaces. It can run the Anyone client as a relay, contributing home bandwidth to the network, as well as act as a ‘router’ – able to proxy home traffic through the Anyone network, without requiring technical knowledge from the operator.

The hardware adds a key layer of diversity and trust to the network. It’s global distribution grows the list of operators and tier-3 ISPs in the network and reduces reliance on highly concentrated cloud providers. Additionally, with its verifiable on-board encryption chip, the hardware can take on trusted roles in the network.

Like in the first tokenomics iteration, hardware operators do not need to lock $ANYONE to register for rewards. The first iteration also designated hardware relays a 2x multiplier on their rewards. This logic has changed to become more potent as the network scales: hardware relays now have a dedicated reward pool with the pool’s emissions split only between hardware fingerprints by their consensus score. This pool supplement the regular relay rewards for every hardware operator.

Validators and Authority Roles

Unlike previous iterations of onion routing, the authority roles - such as directory authorities that aggregate the available relays and bandwidth authorities that determine consensus weight - will not be run by a centralized company indefinitely.

Instead, any holder with sufficient tokens staked to it (either themselves or by delegated stakers) can onboard to become an authority, interact with other authorities in a consensus model, and earn tokens for performing these roles. While a number of roles exist, they all follow the ‘Observer’ model outlined in the Anyone whitepaper and can be considered in aggregate from the perspective of incentives.