What is Mysterium?
In short, it is basically a Decentralized Network of VPN nodes, which acts as a marketplace. It allows anyone to join the network both as a provider – selling their unused network bandwidth, or as a customer – buying VPN service from the Mysterium Network providers. You can imagine it as a combination of a classical (centralized) VPN and the Tor network, with advantages over both of them.
The advantage over a classical VPN is obvious - it's decentralized. Almost all VPN providers tell you that they will never keep any record of your activity or traffic logs. But do you really trust them? I don't, because they possibly can. With decentralized VPN, you don't have this problem anymore. Moreover, if you live in a not-freedom-friendly country, your internet service provider can block the VPN IP address(es). But wait, Mysterium will have thousands of ever changing IPs... try to block that, big brother :)
Compared to Tor, there's a speed advantage. Have you ever used Tor? I did. And I can tell you it's usually slow. Very slow. And do you know why? It's because the "nodes" (a.k.a. people donating their electricity and badwidth) are not incentivized for doing so. In Mysterium Network they are. So it's in their own interest to provide fast and reliable connection, because that's what is earning them money.
The whole functionality concept behind is a bit more complicated, but it is well described in the Mysterium Network's whitepaper (link).
The beginning
The Mysterium Network has been founded in October 2016. After raising more than $14 million in an ICO in less than an hour in May 2017, the team is working on building the whole platform, which is indeed a challenging task. While working on the product, the developers are thus looking for and hiring new team members. The core of the network is being designed at the moment, which is indeed the most important part where no mistakes can be made.
Expected user base growth
Considering the political situation in quite a few highly populated and economically important countries, the potential user base is enormous. Some of us can visit (almost) any website we want, use (almost) any app we want. But some people are not that lucky and have to use VPN to access some of the services. But what will they use when the classical VPNs get blocked by their governments? Guess :)
Economy
Mysterium tokens, the backbone of the decentralized VPN's economical system, are already being traded on two exchanges - a smaller one called Liqui (link) as well as on one of the biggest altcoin exchanges Bittrex (link). Since a new monthly devepment progress update is expected to be published within a few days, we have seen increased trading volumes and volatility on the markets in the past week. The Mysterium token price currently stays in the range of 0.0002 – 0.0003 MYST/BTC, but we will probably see some (most likely upwards) movement when the news from developers are published.
More information at and images courtesy of: https://mysterium.network/