VPNs and crypto tradingWhat the provider keeps, and under whose law

Crypto brings two concerns that most VPN use does not: the value of what is on the other end of the connection, and the fact that exchanges are regulated differently in every country.

That changes which provider properties matter. Speed is close to irrelevant — trading is small amounts of text. What matters is what the provider keeps and which law it keeps it under.

• Speed barely matters here; jurisdiction and logging do
• Five of seven name the firm that examined their no-logs claim
• Five publish the country whose law they operate under
• One provider accepts accounts with no email address and cash payment
• A VPN does not make an exchange's own rules go away

What actually needs checking

Three things, and none of them are on the front of a marketing page.

Who examined the no-logs claim. Deloitte for NordVPN, Surfshark and Private Internet Access; Packetlabs and Leviathan Security Group for Windscribe; six separate organisations for Mullvad. A named firm is a checkable claim; "independently audited" is not.

Which law applies. Panama, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and Canada respectively. This decides how a disclosure request is handled, whatever the policy says.

Whether the account can be opened without identifying you. One provider in our set issues accounts as a random number, needs no email address, and accepts cash. For this use case that is a materially different product from the others.

The part a VPN does not touch

Exchanges verify identity, and that requirement is not affected by your connection.

• Identity verification. A document check is a document check regardless of where you appear to connect from.
• The account's registered country. A record, not an address.
• On-chain activity. Public by design, and unrelated to your IP address.
• Terms of service. Many exchanges prohibit accessing the service from restricted jurisdictions, and connecting through one is a breach whether or not it works.
• Your own device. Software that reads your clipboard or your keystrokes is unaffected by an encrypted tunnel.

This is the boundary worth being clear about: a VPN protects the connection, not the account and not the machine.

Where it genuinely helps

Public and shared networks. If you check balances on hotel Wi-Fi, the network operator otherwise sees which services you connect to. That is a real exposure and a tunnel removes it.

Your ISP's view. Without one, your internet provider has a list of every exchange you have opened. Whether that concerns you is a personal judgement; that it exists is not.

Connection drops. A kill switch prevents the case where the tunnel fails silently mid-session and you carry on unaware. Three of the seven providers we track publish one under that name.

What we are not going to tell you

A great deal of what is written about VPNs and crypto is written to sell subscriptions, and it takes a particular shape: implying that a tunnel provides anonymity, or that a particular jurisdiction puts a provider beyond any legal reach. Neither is a claim we can support from what providers actually publish.

What we can support is narrow. We can tell you which country each provider says it operates under, which outside firm each says examined its logging practice, and how long you have to change your mind. We collected those from the providers' own sites and we republish them with the source attached.

What we cannot tell you is how any of them would behave under pressure, or when each audit was last carried out — that date is not published, and a named audit from several years ago reads identically to a recent one. If that matters to your decision, ask the provider directly rather than trusting a comparison table, including ours.

Why speed is not the criterion here

We measured 40% to 90% of a raw line surviving a tunnel across 14 cities. For video that range is the difference between 4K and 1080p. For a trading interface, which sends and receives small amounts of text, even the bottom of that range is more than sufficient.

Latency is a fairer concern than throughput, and it is mostly a function of distance. Choosing a nearby server rather than a distant one addresses it, and no provider choice compensates for connecting through another continent.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The providers we track

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

Frequently asked questions

Will an exchange ban me for using a VPN?

Policies vary and several prohibit it explicitly, particularly where it is used to reach the service from a restricted jurisdiction. The consequence is an account measure and can include frozen funds. Read the terms rather than taking a general answer from an article.

Does a VPN make transactions anonymous?

No. On-chain activity is public and identity verification at the exchange is unaffected. A VPN hides the network path, and nothing else in that chain.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

What is a VPN, in one paragraph?

A VPN is an encrypted connection between your device and a server run by the provider. Everything you send goes through that tunnel, so the network you are sitting on sees only an encrypted link to one address, and the sites you open see the server's address rather than yours. That is the entire mechanism; the differences between providers are about where the servers are, how fast the route is, and what the provider keeps.

Conclusion

For this use, read the jurisdiction and the auditor before anything else, and check whether the account itself can be opened without identifying you.

We collect all three from the providers' own sites and republish them with the source attached.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.