NordVPN has backtracked on plans to wind down Meshnet, its peer-to-peer networking option, following loud customer protests. The company told subscribers it will keep Meshnet online and begin open-sourcing its technology, inviting outside developers to build it into whatever they want. The leap reflects a larger privacy and networking trend, where transparency and community feedback can make all the difference.
What Meshnet Is and What’s at Stake for Users
Meshnet is a network in which each device can communicate with every other; all of them are encrypted, and they form the equivalent of an extra network overlay—encrypted, regular traffic between all your devices. Taking advantage of the provider’s WireGuard-based protocol, NordLynx, the feature supports up to 60 devices per user and is designed for secure file sharing, remote access, and even lag-free gaming sessions with the lowest possible latency, without exposing your services to the public internet.
For many, Meshnet solves the enduring problem of connectivity in the modern era—how to reach your devices hidden behind NAT, CGNAT, or bypass those stupid firewalls. Rather than fiddle with port forwarding, dynamic DNS, or third-party relays, users can establish private tunnels between laptops and desktops, your phone, and your home server. In practice, that has encompassed everything from family game nights to remotely administering a media server or backing up on-the-go laptops to a NAS running at home.
From Sunsetting to Turnaround After User Feedback
Meshnet was launched in 2022, but gained little traction compared to NordVPN’s other mainstay product—its VPN service. Within, however, there was a slow-boiling realization that led to a plan to phase out the feature. The response was swift: power users pointed to daily workflows dependent on Meshnet, said it was what brought them to subscribe in the first place, and set up community petitions shouting that this was a bad idea.
NordVPN’s message to its customers noted that while Meshnet may have a relatively small user base, it is the most important feature for that group of people. The company pointed to use cases such as secure peer-to-peer file transfers, remote work connectivity, and private gaming as examples of where the feature provides a unique offering that traditional VPN tunnels can’t easily replicate. Instead, community feedback led NordVPN to keep Meshnet online and pursue a more open development model.
Open-source Direction and What It Could Enable
NordVPN has pledged to make Meshnet open source, but has not given a public timeline. When done well, this transition can speed up development in a number of ways:
- Independent code review
- Easier community contributions
- Quicker bug discovery for platform-specific issues
It dovetails with the security community’s love for auditable code, which has paid off in projects such as WireGuard and Nebula, where openness helped make it more reliable and trusted.
Open-sourcing, though, is not a silver bullet. It needs a governance model, a contribution license or an official open-source license, and a roadmap showing where the community version fits into NordVPN’s managed experience. The company will have to develop processes for accepting patches, triaging vulnerabilities, and coordinating disclosures—an area that many organizations rely on practices proposed by groups such as the Open Source Security Foundation.
How It Fits in the Secure Networking Landscape
Meshnet is in line with peer-to-peer overlay networks like Tailscale, ZeroTier, and Nebula. All of these tools share a vision for how to make direct device-to-device connectivity easy and secure, but they differ in identity management, relay infrastructure, and enterprise feature sets. NordVPN has a head start when it comes to distribution and brand: millions already use the base VPN, which makes it easier to try out a mesh feature included in the same app ecosystem.
There’s also a strategic angle. By developing a mesh capability, NordVPN can solve modern edge cases—homelabs, own apps running somewhere, and hybrid work—without having to hairpin traffic via old-school VPN endpoints. For the privacy- and security-conscious user, a mesh that is locally encrypted, peer-validated, and optionally auditable may be a more enticing proposition than services that place heavy reliance on centralized control planes.
What to Expect Next for Users as Meshnet Evolves
For now, nothing is breaking: Meshnet will still be up and running as it transitions to open-source code. Users will still be able to:
- Connect up to 60 devices
- Upload or download shared files
- Route traffic through trusted peers
For a multi-stage release, pure client components will be released first, followed by build instructions and contribution guidelines.
The larger question is how rapidly community energy results in new capabilities, such as improved cross-platform parity, better NAT traversal, or integrations with password managers and secret stores for more secure key handling. If NordVPN combines open development with transparent security reviews, it might actually be able to turn a near miss into a marquee differentiator—and show that heeding the input of a vocal minority can pay dividends within its broader user base.
