Unfortunately, all characteristics of Shadowsocks (SS) and ShadowsocksR (SSR) have been fully and absolutely identified and controlled by GFW (“thanks to” the forced compromise from their developers). In short, as long as the GFW wants to block your VPS, it can now do this easily and perfectly in less than 30 seconds. If you find that your SS/SSR is still working well, that means GFW has no interest or there is no need to ban you right now. Of course, each blocking cycle of GFW is about 10 weeks. Therefore, we can roughly calculate when our VPS can be unblocked.

Where there is oppression, there is resistance there; and where the oppression is greater, the resistance is stronger there. Project V is another very powerful and effective network tools set from China to help users build their own customized network system and counter GFW – it helps you build your own private network with high freedom over the Internet. Thereinto, V2Ray is its core utility – which can work alone or combine with other tools, and is responsible for network protocols and communications. To some extent, we can think of it as a homologous successor to SS/SSR. At present, it has not been killed by GFW, which is mainly because it is relatively difficult to use and does not have a large users group, thus has not become popular enough. But it is 100% certain that when V2Ray becomes easier to use and popular, it will end up exactly the same as Shadowsocks(R) does today.

Project V provides a single kernel and a variety of interface operating modes. The kernel (V2Ray) is used for the actual network interaction, routing and other processing operations for the network data, while the peripheral user interface program provides a convenient and direct operation process. V2Ray has unique advantages in terms of confusing capability, compatibility and connection speed. It supports TCP, mKCP, WebSocket and other underlying transport protocols, supports HTTP, SOCKS, Shadowsocks, VMess and other content transport protocols (HTTP only supports incoming), and comes with a complete TLS implementation. So, it can be a very powerful platform.

V2Ray is a more complex network censorship avoidance system developed on the basis of Shadowsocks, which can be simply understood as an “upgraded + enhanced edition” of Shadowsocks. But more specifically, Shadowsocks is just a simple, single-function proxy tool that is very easy to use; while V2Ray is positioned as a powerful, complex platform that is not easy to get started with, and any developer can develop, expand the functions they need based on it, or utilize modules provided by it to develop a fresh-new proxy software.

Historically, Shadowsocks was originally a program for private use developed by clowwindy, whose original intention is to allow himself to simply and efficiently bypass the local Internet blockade. He had used it for a long time before he felt it’s good enough to be shared. Unfortunately, it was abandoned due to the pressure from local government in the end. While V2Ray is different. It was born as a protest against clowwindy’s abandonment and compromise. In other words, it has been working from the start to make it easier to bypass the Internet blockages. That is to confront the GFW.

Like Shadowsocks, V2Ray is not supported by any commercial company, but entirely developed by volunteers for free and made available as open source for everyone to use. Compared with Shadowsocks, V2Ray provides a more complete protocol (using the self-developed VMess protocol), fixes some shortcomings of Shadowsocks, is harder to be detected by the GFW, and has better network performance, as well as more abundant functions (such as mKCP, dynamic port, routing function, outgoing proxy, packet camouflage, WebSocket protocol, Mux). However, V2Ray has not reached the popularity degree of Shadowsocks, and is relatively weak in terms of software support. That is, it is only popular among very few people who like to think about over the anti-GFW technologies.

Also like Shadowsocks, V2Ray needs to run on both the server end and the client side. That’s to say, you need to configure a remote server in addition to the device you’re using. It is important to note that, unlike Shadowsocks, V2Ray does not distinguish between the server side or the client side. This means that the V2Ray running on the server or the client is the identical software with the only difference being their configuration file.

// Key Features //

• Multiple inbound/outbound proxies: one V2Ray instance supports in parallel multiple inbound and outbound protocols. Each protocol works independently
• Customizable routing: incoming traffic can be sent to different outbounds based on routing configuration. It is easy to route traffic by target region or domain
• Multiple protocols: V2Ray supports multiple protocols, including Socks, HTTP, Shadowsocks, VMess etc. Each protocol may have its own transport, such as TCP, mKCP, WebSocket etc.
• Obfuscation: V2Ray has built in obfuscation to hide traffic in TLS, and can run in parallel with web servers
• Reverse proxy: General support of reverse proxy. Can be used to build tunnels to localhost
• Multiple platforms: V2Ray runs natively on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc. There is also third party support on mobile

// Popular GUI Tools //

GUI	Language	Platform	Download
V2RayW	English, Chinese	Windows
V2RayN	Chinese
Clash	Unknown
V2RayX	Unknown	Mac
V2RayU
ClashX
Qv2ray	English, Chinese	Windows | Mac | Linux
Mellow	Unknown
Kitsunebi	Unknown	Android | iOS
Shadowrocket	Unknown	iOS
BifrostV	English, Chinese	Android
V2RayNG

// Prompts //

• V2Ray’s verification method includes the system time. If the system time is not synchronized, you can not successfully connect to the V2Ray server even there is no problem with the configuration, because the server will consider this to be an illegal request. So, your system time and the server time must be as identical as possible. It’s usually fine as long as the time error between the two is within 90 seconds.
• To use V2Ray friendly, you can use the GUI tools above.
• If your system’s time zone Settings are wrong, then V2Ray may keep reporting errors and become unavailable.

// Related Links //

• V2Ray Frequently Asked Questions
• Online UUID Generator Tool

// Download URLs //

License	Version	Download	Size
Freeware	Latest		n/a

(Homepage | GitHub)