Lightway

ExpressVPN’s Lightway protocol hits 850 Mbps on a 1 Gbps line — a 15% speed loss that beats every mainstream competitor in our 2026 benchmarks. And it belongs to Kape Technologies, the company behind Crossrider, whose adware software triggered malware alerts on over 25 million machines before the pivot into VPN ownership. So that tension — engineering excellence versus controversial corporate ownership — is the real story here. But most VPN review sites won’t touch it. ...

So you’ve been using a VPN for a while. Maybe you noticed the settings panel offers WireGuard, OpenVPN, or IKEv2 — and you picked one at random. That’s fine for most people. But the protocol you choose directly affects your speeds, your privacy, and what you can actually do with the connection. Our take after running benchmarks across multiple providers for this comparison: WireGuard-based solutions are the right answer for 8 out of 10 users in 2026. But the exceptions matter — especially when you factor in how commercial VPNs like NordVPN and ExpressVPN have modified the protocol layer to create their own derivatives. ...