Hey stackers,
I'm the founder of CypherESIM (https://cypheresim.com) - a travel eSIM you can buy without telling anyone who you are. No account, no email, no ID. Pick a plan, pay, scan a QR — you're online in about a minute.
- 180+ countries, local 4G/5G rates, plans from $1
- No KYC, ever — we can't leak what we never collect
- Works on the web or entirely inside a Telegram bot
- Tor mirror: http://cypherd27lrn7bs25dd347zj7kyzfilpcjetbllh64odroqjyoi2mxad.onion/
- Payments: on-chain BTC (and Monero for the XMR folks). Lightning isn't live yet - I know that's table stakes here. It's #1 on the list, and honestly this post is partly me committing to it publicly.
One more thing: on August 1 we're launching anonymous eSIMs with a real EU phone number — voice calls + SMS included. Same rules: no KYC, no account, pay in crypto. And there's a bigger product line in the works right after.
If you'd want early access to the number plans — say so in the comments, stackers get them before the public.
I'll be in the comments. Happy to answer anything, including the uncomfortable questions. And if you use Silent.link or Dracotel — tell me what they do better, I genuinely want to know.
Excellent, I'll take a look. It's irritating when you travel and rely on local SIMs with KYC.
check out your x inbox i sent you a message ....
Legal?
of course not
"catch me if you can" type of business
And so phone number is not yet part of the service, right? This is pretty cool - yeah lightning accepting would be good.
I’ll ignore the obvious AI-ness of this post to ask this:
Can you explain how this works, or tell me where I can read more about it? Are you exploiting some kind of loophole to offer no-KYC service? And how difficult would it be to do something like this just for my own use?
All I know is in the FAQ section of silent.link.
Fair hit on the AI polish - English isn't my first language (I'm Ukrainian), so I use tools to make posts readable( The product and the answers are mine though, so ask away.
On how it works 0 honestly, no loophole. It's a stack of boring facts:
Prepaid data-only roaming SIMs issued from jurisdictions with no mandatory SIM registration don't require subscriber ID at all
Providers like us buy wholesale from those operators. The operator sees one business account (ours), not the end user. So the only identity in the chain is whatever the reseller chooses to collect - and we chose to collect nothing: no account, no email, crypto payment, your order exists as an opaque ID
Our team comes from the telecom side - years of it - so we work directly with several operators and wholesale suppliers, not through a single aggregator API. In practice that gives two things:
Redundancy - if one upstream degrades in a country, we route new orders through another
Performance - where possible, our profiles use local breakout / local network identities instead of home-routed roaming. The visited network treats the eSIM almost like a local SIM: local IPs, lower latency, better speeds than the classic "route everything through one EU core" setup most travel eSIMs run.
Silent.link works on the same regulatory mechanics at the network layer (their FAQ hints at it) - the real differences between providers are what they refuse to collect, and how their routing is built.
On DIY for personal use: technically possible - wholesale eSIM aggregators do sell APIs - but they onboard businesses, with volume commitments and KYB checks on you, which is ironic given the goal. For one person it's not worth the paperwork: buying from any no-KYC provider with crypto gets you the same result in two minutes
So no magic and no loopholes - just boring telecom plumbing, done by people who've spent years in it
I see, thanks!
Ok, fair, but I wouldn’t recommend using ChatGPT to replace your English skills, if that’s what you’re using it for. For example, I write my posts in English in my own words, and then I let it only fix mistakes (from which I learn).
damn i feel so old, how so?
My take:
Seems expensive.
Why not just use the free hotel wifi when you travel?
Ha - as the other reply said, the whole point of traveling is leaving the hotel :)
On price: plans start at $1 (a week in Thailand is ~$3.50) - less than the coffee you buy to sit on that "free" wifi. And hotel wifi is a shared network you don't control: fine for Netflix, less fine for wallets and 2FA. Cheap mobile data bought without your identity is just a cleaner default.
Sure your product may appeal to some travelers but do you guarantee the security of all data carried over your service?
According to your website one week in Thailand is $3.11 but you only get 1 GB for that whole week.
In Thailand you can get unlimited data for 300baht/month via AIS- that's about $10...sure you must show passport to get it but as far as using a BTC/LN wallet there is it really any greater risk?
you can't just spend the whole day in a hotel ;)
Hopefully you don't spend all your time traveling glued to your phone or laptop?
There's a real world out there!
is there ? :)
This is a great use case for Bitcoin: non kyc esims make so much sense. Especially when you get to accepting lightning.
I currently use silent.link for this when travelling. I'm curious if you all have a plan to distinguish your service from theirs.
Fair question - and silent.link is genuinely good, I won't pretend otherwise. Their Lightning flow and never-expiring balance are excellent.
Where we differ today:
Where they beat us today, honestly: Lightning (being fixed) and US numbers — our answer is EU numbers with voice + SMS on August 1.
The longer bet: one no-KYC flow for the whole stack — data, a real number, and more coming. That's the differentiation
What are the general privacy/security tradeoffs of using one of these travel eSIMs vs paying the higher international data rates for my domestic cell data provider? The answer is likely just use a VPN with both to be safe, but is there increased risk of the unknown (to me) cheap data provider trying to pull off a man in the middle attack compared to a generally known entity that is my domestic data provider?
fantastic , definitely in for early access... and if you need a space to sell and promote the sim cards visit my project satslist.shop or drop a comment here and i'll leave instructions , we're @ early access stage too right now
Nice work.
I was about to ask you about LN
I've already assigned this task to our team-it will be available soon
Awesome! I support all non-KYC services.
Early access to the number plans plz.
Giving early access to EU number plans with voice/SMS sounds massive. Honestly, the main edge silent.link currently has is how seamless the Lightning integration is for instant checkout, so glad to hear LN is your top priority. Looking forward to the August 1st launch!