The Meile dVPN team is thrilled to announce the release of version 2.5.0, now available for all desktop platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release represents a significant leap forward in our mission to provide users with the most private and user friendly decentralized VPN experience possible. From groundbreaking privacy enhancements to streamlined payment options and performance improvements, v2.5.0 delivers meaningful upgrades across the board.
Ring Sessions: Monero-Inspired Privacy for Your Connections
The headline feature of this release is Ring Sessions, a new opt-in privacy enhancement available to plan subscribers that draws direct inspiration from Monero’s legendary ring signature technology. This feature fundamentally changes how your VPN sessions appear on the Sentinel blockchain, making it harder for observers to extract meaningful metadata about your activity.
When you connect to a node through Meile dVPN, your wallet creates a unique session transaction that gets recorded on-chain. This transaction inherently contains metadata, including the timestamp of your connection and which specific node you’re connecting to. For privacy conscious users, this on-chain footprint has been a point of concern.
Ring Sessions addresses this by generating 8 decoy session transactions simultaneously with your real connection. These decoys select random nodes from your plan and create legitimate looking session transactions that blend together with your actual session. The result is that any observer attempting to analyze blockchain data sees 9 nearly identical transactions occurring at the same time, with no way to distinguish which one represents your true connection. Your real session effectively hides in plain sight among the decoys, obfuscating the metadata that would otherwise reveal your VPN usage patterns.
This feature is currently opt-in and can be enabled through the Settings menu. The initial implementation uses 8 decoys, a number carefully chosen to provide meaningful privacy benefits without significantly impacting connection times. The team has additional improvements planned for future releases, and the feature will continue to evolve.
It’s worth noting that Ring Sessions only became technically possible following the Sentinel v12 network upgrade in October. Prior to this upgrade, wallets were restricted to maintaining only one active session at a time, making the decoy approach impossible. The v12 upgrade lifted this restriction, opening the door for this innovative privacy enhancement.
Zephyr Protocol and ZSD: Private Stablecoin Payments
Meile dVPN v2.5.0 introduces support for Zephyr Protocol’s ZSD stablecoin as a payment option for plan subscriptions, marking the integration of another privacy-focused cryptocurrency and notably the second private stablecoin to be supported by the application.
Zephyr Protocol represents one of the most innovative developments in privacy-preserving decentralized finance. Built as a fork of Monero, Zephyr inherits the battle-tested privacy technology that has made Monero the gold standard for confidential transactions. All transactions on Zephyr utilize ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT (Ring Confidential Transactions), ensuring that senders, receivers, and amounts remain private by default.
What makes Zephyr truly groundbreaking is its implementation of the DJED algorithmic stablecoin protocol. DJED was originally conceived by IOG (Input Output Global), the company behind Cardano, with the protocol designed by Charles Hoskinson’s team. The DJED design creates a crypto-backed stablecoin that maintains its peg through an innovative reserve mechanism and mathematical guarantees rather than centralized collateral or pure algorithmic rebasing.
Zephyr’s implementation brings DJED into the privacy coin space, creating ZSD (Zephyr Stable Dollars), a stablecoin that combines price stability with Monero-grade privacy. This means Meile dVPN users can now pay for their subscriptions with a stable-value asset while maintaining complete transaction privacy. Neither the amount paid nor the parties involved in the transaction are visible on the blockchain, providing an unprecedented level of financial privacy for VPN services.
https://zephyrprotocol.com/
Auto-Filtering of Plan Nodes
User experience receives a meaningful upgrade in v2.5.0 with the introduction of automatic node filtering for plans. Previously, users needed to manually click the “Filter Nodes” button after expanding their plan to see which nodes were available and connectable. This extra step, while minor, added friction to the connection process.
Now, simply expanding a plan automatically filters the node list to display only the nodes included in that plan that are currently online and ready to accept connections. This streamlined workflow reduces the clicks needed to get connected and provides instant visibility into your available options. It’s a small change that makes the daily experience of using Meile dVPN noticeably smoother.
Firo InstantLock: Lightning-Fast Private Payments
Building on our commitment to supporting privacy-preserving payment methods, v2.5.0 integrates Firo’s InstantLock technology for Spark transactions. This feature enables near-instant settlement of private payments, dramatically reducing the time users need to wait for their subscription transactions to confirm.
Firo’s InstantLock technology has its roots in Dash’s InstantSend (originally called InstantPay), which pioneered the concept of using masternode quorums to lock transactions and provide immediate finality. When a Firo transaction is sent with InstantLock, a quorum of masternodes reaches consensus on the transaction within seconds, allowing merchants and services to accept the payment with confidence before it’s included in a block.
The practical impact for Meile dVPN users is substantial. Transactions can now be confirmed as quickly as Bitcoin Lightning payments, meaning you can complete your subscription purchase and start using your VPN almost immediately. Combined with Firo’s Spark protocol, which provides strong privacy guarantees for your payment, InstantLock delivers the best of both worlds: privacy and speed.
https://firo.org
Slimmed-Down SDK: Faster Boot Times Return to Windows
Under the hood, v2.5.0 delivers a significant technical improvement that Windows users in particular will appreciate. The development team successfully reduced the size of the sentinel-protobuf SDK dependency from a hefty 34MB down to just 1MB, eliminating substantial bloat that had accumulated in the codebase.
This 97% reduction in SDK size translates directly into improved application performance. Windows users will now experience boot-up times under 10 seconds again, returning to the snappy startup experience that users expect from desktop applications. While this change happens entirely behind the scenes, the impact on daily usability is immediately noticeable.
Meile dVPN v2.5.0 is available now for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Whether you’re drawn to the enhanced on-chain privacy of Ring Sessions, the financial privacy of Zephyr/ZSD payments, the convenience of auto-filtering and InstantLock, or simply the faster boot times, this release has something meaningful for every user. Download the latest version and experience the next evolution of decentralized VPN technology.
https://meile.app
