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Psiphon Blog

The Real Psiphon: Continuous Innovation with Forge & Conduit

Updated: 2026-04-28

The Real Psiphon: continuous innovation across the app, Forge, and Conduit

Most people know the Psiphon app. Few know the real Psiphon and our commitment to continuous innovations like Forge & Conduit. The Psiphon app and network is where most people encounter us, for good reason. With more than 500 million downloads, it is the most widely used anti-censorship platform in the world, enabling tens of millions of users every day to access the Internet within the most heavily restricted environments on the planet. For those users, it's the one app that they can rely on when nothing else works. What makes that possible is a global managed network operating behind the scenes: thousands of servers distributed across jurisdictions, built on a multi-protocol approach that continuously adapts to detection and blocking. When a government shuts down a platform or throttles a protocol, our systems respond in real time.

Enabling other apps to use Psiphon. Psiphon Forge takes that same infrastructure and makes it embeddable. Through a lightweight API, any application—from messaging platforms to logistics, from FinTech to broadcasting—can integrate Psiphon's anti-censorship capabilities directly into its own product. Network continuity becomes a feature of the application itself, not something users have to seek out separately. In environments where connectivity can disappear without warning, that distinction matters.

Conduit—the next layer. Conduit represents a different approach to the same problem, reflecting years of internal R&D and collaboration with our research and technology partners. Rather than relying solely on Psiphon-managed servers, Conduit enables individuals and organizations to contribute nodes to the network and be rewarded for doing so. The result is a participatory, incentivized and inherently distributed network that grows organically, and that becomes harder to block precisely because it has no single point of failure or control. At the peer-to-peer level, Conduit traffic looks different from what censors have learned to target. At the network level, it scales in ways that centrally managed infrastructure cannot.

The proof. The level of adoption reflects that, with over 1.7 million individual stations supporting users in over 200 regions. This isn't a replacement for what we've built. It's the next layer, the kind of step that only becomes possible when you've spent years understanding the problem deeply enough to rethink it. Censorship, at scale, is a distributed problem. Addressing it effectively means building a distributed response, one that operates at the protocol level, the application level, and the network-participation level simultaneously. Continuous innovation. Continuous evolution. It's what we do.

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