IVPN now accepts Monero payments, runs full node
IVPN News By Viktor Vecsei | Posted on January 13, 2021
The core mission of IVPN is to help our customers protect their privacy. We believe maintaining financial privacy is important for achieving freedom from surveillance, and we seek to support projects that help this cause.
Bitcoin, as the most widely used cryptocurrency, has great potential to assist us to conduct financial transactions anonymously. Bitcoin transactions, however, are transparent and traceable through blockchain analysis methods. If one correlates your personal information to your wallet address, they can associate your Bitcoin transactions with your persona.
The Monero project aims to improve on the anonymity promise by implementing safeguards against traceability issues by using ring signatures and stealth addresses by default. To help customers subscribe to IVPN anonymously, we now accept Monero as payment for our service.
Payments deposited go to IVPN’s self-hosted Monero wallet, this way both our customers and IVPN maintain independence from centralized payment providers. We also run our own node to verify transactions and to support the Monero network.
As a first step, we have enabled Monero payments for new IVPN accounts and those registered after 10 November 2020. Existing customers who registered before that date and wish to switch to Monero at once can ask for a refund on their subscription and generate a new account.
If you are new to cryptocurrencies or Monero, here are a few basic tips to use them to improve your financial privacy:
- When you plan to purchase goods or services online anonymously, use Monero instead of Bitcoin.
- Use self-hosted wallets (or just..wallets) as opposed to hosted wallets to hold your cryptocurrency - “not your keys, not your coins”.
- Where possible, pick merchants that accept direct payments to their wallets as opposed to using payment provider intermediaries.
For detailed information on Monero and more tips on getting started, visit: https://www.getmonero.org
We are assessing making other cryptocurrencies available for direct payments in the future; contact us if you have a favored solution we should look into.
IVPN Staff
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