During his academic research into large-scale, elastic cloud-native and distributed AI systems, Dr Yifei Ren encountered a fundamental limitation: existing overlay networks like Tailscale and NetBird could not scale reliably or securely for the next generation of AI workloads. This bottleneck became the spark for VeilNet — a new architecture designed for massive, dynamic, quantum-secure networks where traditional VPN models simply fail to operate.

In November 2024, Dr Yifei Ren began building the VeilNet MVP — the first proof-of-concept implementation of a fully decentralised VeilNet architecture, validated through extensive simulated testing. Realising its potential to redefine the foundation of present and future cloud-native systems, Dr Ren pitched the concept to the Curtin Accelerate Program, where it was successfully accepted.

By April 2025, the internal test build of VeilNet was completed. A series of small-scale internal evaluations validated the core feasibility of the VeilNet architecture — particularly the Reinforcement-Learning–driven routing engine in the Anchor Protocol. At this stage, the system still relied on WireGuard for the secure channel and regional MQTT clusters for the control plane. WireGuard quickly emerged as a bottleneck, revealing the limitations of its design and reinforcing the need for a native, decentralised VeilNet secure channel.

In June 2025, the alpha release of VeilNet — codenamed VeilNet Rift — was completed. This was the first version to adopt WebRTC data channels as the primary transport layer, delivering major performance gains and seamless compatibility with cloud-native environments such as Kubernetes and Docker. During this phase, Dr Ren also secured AWS startup credits and deployed the first public test deployment of VeilNet on AWS, marking the project’s transition from research prototype to a publicly accessible system.

In July 2025, the first public test version of VeilNet was released — marking its debut as a post-quantum, decentralised alternative to traditional personal VPNs. This was the first time VeilNet became publicly accessible, allowing users worldwide to experience its next-generation architecture. The launch generated strong interest, attracting over 2,500 registered users within the first month.

In August 2025, Dr Ren was accepted into the Antler Residency Program. During a one-week market campaign later that month, the VeilNet Rift application saw explosive growth — gaining more than 4,000 registered users and over 20,000 downloads in under a week, validating strong market interest and user demand.

In September 2025, Adam O'Donnell and Thuushal Kumar joined the VeilNet team.
Adam brings deep leadership experience from an 18-year career in Special Forces and now specialises in building resilient, adaptive teams and go-to-market strategies — strengths well-suited to scaling VeilNet as a post-quantum secure, self-healing, non-mesh overlay network for large-scale elastic cloud-native systems.
Thuushal Kumar joins with a strong background in business consulting and technology risk. As a former manager at EY (Business Consulting), he advised clients across Australia, the UK, and the US on technology risk and operational transformation — skills valuable for shaping VeilNet’s business strategy, compliance posture, and enterprise readiness.

The beta release of VeilNet — now called VeilNet Conflux — rolled out on 1 December 2025.
This version represents a ground-up overhaul of the architecture: the control channel is now powered by a global NATS super-cluster, replacing earlier, less scalable control-plane designs.
By using NATS as the message broker, Conflux gains high throughput, low-latency messaging, automatic scaling and self-healing capabilities — qualities essential for a production-grade infrastructure platform. VeilNet now aggregates multiple WebRTC data-channel connections into high-availability transport paths, improving reliability, resilience and throughput for cloud-native workloads.
A new Packet Level Authentication (PLA) mechanism has also been added to enforce strict access control and security at the packet level — strengthening VeilNet’s posture as a secure, post-quantum ready overlay network.With these upgrades, VeilNet is re-positioned not just as a personal VPN alternative, but as a full-featured developer tool and infrastructure layer — suitable for cloud-native systems, microservices, container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes / Docker), edge deployments, and distributed AI/ML workloads.