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Comment by Whistlethis | Hacker News Reader

Well this is fun. So tell us then did Honeygain get created so nordvpn could use their IPs for streaming and also sell to competitors as lexistream? Tell us about the lexistream creation if you are in fact an ex employee.

Also would love to hear your take on shortcuts taken by honeygain to acquire IPs as I’ve heard about botnet usage.

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At its core, Honeygain was created to supply Oxylabs with proxies. Residential IP addresses are very valuable in this market but they are not easy to acquire. Giving people money for allowing their IP address to be used for various purposes in the proxy field is a good venture. However, since you have to pay the users, it can hardly be profitable. That's why JumpTask and Lexistream (yup, Lexistream is also a product of Oxylabs/Honeygain team :) ) were created. JumpTask allows them to pay users less whereas Lexistream allows the usage of IPs acquired via Honeygain to be used for streaming purposes (as its called there - Content Delivery or CD) and as an channel of revenue by selling those streaming IPs to VPNs and whatnot. Now, of course, most of these streaming IPs are sold on the inside for products that are under Tesonet's portfolio. NordVPN is the biggest client, needless to say. They also supply Surfshark. These IPs are sold for Tesonet at a lower price since they are all connected. The prices for "outsiders", such as Cyberghost or Windscribe are bigger. You could argue that this is nothing TOO bad about this, but think about the power dynamics here. Think why streaming services such as Netflix work so well with NordVPN as opposed to other VPNs? When you control the pool (via Lexistream, Honeygain, Oxylabs and so on), you have control on which IPs to give to whom. Favoring NordVPN, they give actually good quality IPs to them and a mixed bag for "outsiders". They can also simply turn off the streaming feature for certain IPs to keep Nord and other buddies in check, as in, keeping them the most reliable VPN when it comes to streaming. This gives a competitve edge as you may understand. Finally, in regards to botnet usage in IP acquisition, I can surely say that this is not true. No shortcuts taken in the acquisition of IPs.

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What are the main competitors of Lexistream? Do they even have any serious competitors for this streaming business?

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