Keep the Internet Private Built on Bittensor SN25
California, USA
- Tweets 74
- Following 5
- Followers 4,039
- Likes 642
39 experiments in two months, all with one goal:
the best encryption and the best speed, for everyday use
Privacy often comes with a cost to speed. We're always running research on our code to improve and make that tradeoff disappear
Ideally you don't even have to think about it
Our new report collects the last couple of months of that research, with every experiment on a timeline showing what it measured and whether we kept it. Even failed tests are valuable to learn from
A few that stood out:
- in our phone tests, a Wikipedia page went from 2.5-4 seconds to about half a second
- a local test link hit gigabit-class speeds after we changed how much data is kept in flight
- a tighter memory limit actually hurt speeds by about a third, so we killed that change
Full report below
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Full report, with all 39 experiments, how we tested them and what's still open
ur.xyz/research/2026-q3-repo…
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The prospect of trillions of AI agents trawling public data around the clock is reason enough to take privacy seriously
Your wallet history, old posts & location clues become far more revealing when machines can connect them into a detailed profile at a speed and scale no human could match
The effort required to piece that information together has provided some protection until now, and AI is rapidly eroding it
That has implications for targeted scams, commercial surveillance and how easily strangers can infer your wealth, habits + relationships
This is why I’m interested in emerging protocols protecting payments, AI interactions and internet traffic, with close attention to what they actually conceal and who can still see the data
What we expose today could remain available for far more capable systems to analyse years from now
$ZEC climbed ~4x to ~$1,250 in roughly a year
You're probably thinking the privacy ship has already sailed, but you'd be mistaken
Beyond Zcash, emerging protocols are bringing privacy to payments, trading & internet access
Three names on our watchlist:
1) @NullMaskio $MASK
Brings shielded transfers and swaps that obscure the trader’s identity to existing EVM wallets such as MetaMask and Rabby through a custom RPC
Founded by Tomas Krnak, whose team developed shielded transaction support for Trezor, it reported $50m+ in combined deposit, withdrawal and swap volume between 1–19 October
Using familiar wallets makes adoption easier, although deposits, withdrawals and swap amounts remain public, and the operator can read private balances and history
2) @UmbraPrivacy $UMBRA
Supports private balances, payments and swaps on Solana, helping users protect financial information such as holdings, salaries and commercial transactions
Its October 2025 MetaDAO token sale attracted ~$155m in commitments against a $3m cap, followed by its public wallet launch in March 2026
Payroll and treasury management offer practical applications, where public transactions can expose compensation, counterparties and business relationships
Deposits, withdrawals and network metadata still carry privacy limitations
3) @urnetwork on Bittensor SN25
Encrypts and routes internet traffic through distributed connections, founded by former Palantir engineer Brien Colwell
The existing URnetwork has reported 350K+ monthly users, with 100K+ providers being transitioned into Bittensor miners following October’s mainnet launch
Bittensor adds incentives for supplying connectivity and validators that check delivery, building on an existing network and user base
Each addresses a different privacy need, with different trust assumptions and token economics
Our comparison looks at adoption, who pays for each service and how that activity benefits the token
Follow @KhalaResearch for research on emerging crypto protocols
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URnetwork retweeted
$ZEC climbed ~4x to ~$1,250 in roughly a year
You're probably thinking the privacy ship has already sailed, but you'd be mistaken
Beyond Zcash, emerging protocols are bringing privacy to payments, trading & internet access
Three names on our watchlist:
1) @NullMaskio $MASK
Brings shielded transfers and swaps that obscure the trader’s identity to existing EVM wallets such as MetaMask and Rabby through a custom RPC
Founded by Tomas Krnak, whose team developed shielded transaction support for Trezor, it reported $50m+ in combined deposit, withdrawal and swap volume between 1–19 October
Using familiar wallets makes adoption easier, although deposits, withdrawals and swap amounts remain public, and the operator can read private balances and history
2) @UmbraPrivacy $UMBRA
Supports private balances, payments and swaps on Solana, helping users protect financial information such as holdings, salaries and commercial transactions
Its October 2025 MetaDAO token sale attracted ~$155m in commitments against a $3m cap, followed by its public wallet launch in March 2026
Payroll and treasury management offer practical applications, where public transactions can expose compensation, counterparties and business relationships
Deposits, withdrawals and network metadata still carry privacy limitations
3) @urnetwork on Bittensor SN25
Encrypts and routes internet traffic through distributed connections, founded by former Palantir engineer Brien Colwell
The existing URnetwork has reported 350K+ monthly users, with 100K+ providers being transitioned into Bittensor miners following October’s mainnet launch
Bittensor adds incentives for supplying connectivity and validators that check delivery, building on an existing network and user base
Each addresses a different privacy need, with different trust assumptions and token economics
Our comparison looks at adoption, who pays for each service and how that activity benefits the token
Follow @KhalaResearch for research on emerging crypto protocols
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URnetwork retweeted
UR (@urnetwork) is teaming up with @Persistent_AI on joint privacy research, here’s where where Private Inference fits in:
We’ll become a UR network operator, anonymising our traffic through UR's proxy network. Why? This lets us close the final privacy gap in our stack:
We cover payment privacy.
We cover prompt encryption & safeguarding.
No one covered network anonymity - until UR.io showed up.
Soon UR.io users will have the option of a PrivateInference-bundled subscription service too.
Say it with us: Private is Better
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URnetwork retweeted
PersistentAI is becoming a network operator on UR (@urnetwork).
What we’re cooking:
Joint privacy research - looking into zkAPI & private, open-model routing.
Persistent’s Private Inference (@P_Inference) hooking into UR.io to make it’s traffic anonymous via UR’s proxy network.
Eventual Private Inference subscription layer available to all @urnetwork users.
Say it with us: Private is Better
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UR is partnering with @Persistent_AI. Through its product @P_Inference, Persistent AI is joining UR as our newest Network Operator.
Every AI request exposes three things about the person sending it:
1. Their identity
2. What they asked
3. Where they are connecting from
Private Inference has been building private AI that solves the first two. It gives people access to leading models such as GPT and Claude without storing their chats, and lets them pay privately.
UR solves the third. As a Network Operator, Persistent AI will route Private Inference's traffic over UR, where it is encrypted and sent out through connections shared by people globally, keeping users' IP addresses private.
Network Operators are where demand for SN25 alpha comes from. They pay for the traffic they use in alpha, so every new operator brings new demand to the subnet.
Both teams are passionate about AI and privacy, and the network is the first thing we are working on together.
Keep the internet private
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One of the most common myths about VPNs is that they guarantee privacy
In reality, it just moves the view from your ISP to the VPN company, and you have to trust them not to log your data
On UR, privacy is in the design and the code is open source
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"If you cannot grow [and make money], then you die... and so you should"
We hold UR to that standard
Over the years, privacy has been taken from all of us, piece by piece - your searches, your location, the sites you visit, all bought and sold
Our mission is to give it back to people
Great technology at scale changes lives, so we are building for billions
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URnetwork retweeted
Building a world where users can protect their traffic is the right thing to do
That is why UR (SN25) replaces identities with integer counters in its anonymised data exports, carrying nothing across blocks and nothing back to a real user, and verifies every route with four Ed25519 signatures that prove a live egress without ever revealing who stood at either end
Self sovereign currencies and identities are congruent and unstoppable
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Great piece from Shayon
TL;DR:
- training data is a one-off purchase per model run
- agents search the web every time they act, so retrieval is the far bigger market
- a lot of that traffic gets through more reliably on residential connections
That's the network we've been building for the last 3 years. We have over 100k providers, giving us a diverse range of residential IPs around the world, and each one makes the network stronger
Agents can already use it too, with the same benefits people get, and our MCP server makes it easy to plug in
Usually, what an agent reads can be traced back to whoever is running it. On UR, that traffic is encrypted across the network, and sites see a provider's connection, not who's behind the request
Privacy for humans and agents alike
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Most startups don't make it to the 5 year mark
We have already been around for 3 years and are focused on building something that's useful for every day users, while being sustainable
"We've already gotten to a million networks... let's get to 10 million in the next year"
Our mission is to build a success story around privacy encryption infrastructure that works
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“We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.”
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993)
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URnetwork retweeted
In the UR (SN25) September Letter to Tokenholders, we outlined some core observations + objectives:
1) privacy is crypto's best-performing corner and the strongest moat (A16z: "privacy will be the most important moat"), UR's goal is to make privacy a seamless internet default for 1 billion people built on Bittensor
2) UR is live on mainnet, and we will be scaling our "Network Operator" franchise model, whereby SN25 token holders will have an ever increasing utility as demand scales
3) UR will grow miners ~10x (100k → 1M) via Bittensor, and we will ~50x active miners on Bittensor via our existing 100k fleet of miners. More people participating in the movement for privacy via Bittensor
ur.xyz/investors/letter-to-t…
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URnetwork retweeted
Subnet 25 @urnetwork will have more miners than the rest of Bittensor combined by a long shot (50x+) and they all strengthen the product ever so slightly. Ingenious incentive design by @xcolwell, truly a gifted builder. $TAO
UR is live on mainnet on SN25!
- Our 100k+ network providers are being transitioned to Bittensor miners
- Our validator is active, setting weights and verifying traffic
- It's permissionless for anyone to become a miner or validator
- Launch of Network Capacity Reserve (more info below)
After many weeks of hard work and countless hours spent to get here, we are proud of this milestone and appreciate all your patience on the journey
The job is far from complete but this is a big step forward by moving our infrastructure onchain. The core mission is very important to us and it's critical we build with intention, while properly testing these new changes
UR is building the privacy network for everyone and we are excited to be building this alongside the Bittensor community
Together we will help empower people across the world to have privacy online
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we launched UR on SN25 at the end of august and it took a bunch of work to get here but excited that it's live on mainnet now and the existing network is all going to work on top of bittensor
this is a milestone but there's a lot more work to be done
privacy is a human right and in this modern world we need to take back some control
if you fall into the classic trap of "I have nothing to hide", then you really haven't thought deeply enough about this because I guarantee there's things you do in your life for your own privacy
let's make privacy normalised for everyone and not a taboo thing that's associated with bad actors
UR is live on mainnet on SN25!
- Our 100k+ network providers are being transitioned to Bittensor miners
- Our validator is active, setting weights and verifying traffic
- It's permissionless for anyone to become a miner or validator
- Launch of Network Capacity Reserve (more info below)
After many weeks of hard work and countless hours spent to get here, we are proud of this milestone and appreciate all your patience on the journey
The job is far from complete but this is a big step forward by moving our infrastructure onchain. The core mission is very important to us and it's critical we build with intention, while properly testing these new changes
UR is building the privacy network for everyone and we are excited to be building this alongside the Bittensor community
Together we will help empower people across the world to have privacy online
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URnetwork retweeted
No matter what they say, privacy is not the refuge of people who have something to hide, nor a premium feature to be granted to the deserving few.
It is the ordinary condition of a free human life, which is why technologists have an obligation to make privacy first the mandate for the people.
With Bittensor, we found a home of the people dedicated to the movement for open source software
It is the worthy place to chase the dream of individual ownership and freedom via new privacy first protocols
At UR (SN25), I will help the team shape further products dedicated to this mission
UR is live on mainnet on SN25!
- Our 100k+ network providers are being transitioned to Bittensor miners
- Our validator is active, setting weights and verifying traffic
- It's permissionless for anyone to become a miner or validator
- Launch of Network Capacity Reserve (more info below)
After many weeks of hard work and countless hours spent to get here, we are proud of this milestone and appreciate all your patience on the journey
The job is far from complete but this is a big step forward by moving our infrastructure onchain. The core mission is very important to us and it's critical we build with intention, while properly testing these new changes
UR is building the privacy network for everyone and we are excited to be building this alongside the Bittensor community
Together we will help empower people across the world to have privacy online
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URnetwork retweeted
BREAKING: SN25 UR mainnet is live!
Over 100k+ network providers are being transitioned to miners on Bittensor!
UR is live on mainnet on SN25!
- Our 100k+ network providers are being transitioned to Bittensor miners
- Our validator is active, setting weights and verifying traffic
- It's permissionless for anyone to become a miner or validator
- Launch of Network Capacity Reserve (more info below)
After many weeks of hard work and countless hours spent to get here, we are proud of this milestone and appreciate all your patience on the journey
The job is far from complete but this is a big step forward by moving our infrastructure onchain. The core mission is very important to us and it's critical we build with intention, while properly testing these new changes
UR is building the privacy network for everyone and we are excited to be building this alongside the Bittensor community
Together we will help empower people across the world to have privacy online
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