What is Xray? The Xray-core Behind VLESS and Reality
Xray is a high-performance proxy core — a fork of V2Ray, known as Xray-core — that powers modern anti-censorship protocols like VLESS and Reality. It keeps V2Ray's flexibility but adds faster speeds, better stealth, and cutting-edge features that make blocked traffic look like ordinary HTTPS.
Xray is a fork of V2Ray
Xray-core grew out of V2Ray and stays compatible with it, so it supports the same protocols — VMESS, VLESS, Shadowsocks, Trojan and SOCKS5. The difference is that Xray is developed more actively and ships new anti-blocking tech first.
It powers VLESS
VLESS is a lightweight, low-overhead protocol that runs on Xray-core. It drops the heavier encryption of VMESS and instead relies on TLS for security, which makes connections faster and easier to disguise as normal web traffic.
Reality: stealth without certificates
Reality is an Xray feature that borrows the TLS handshake of a real, trusted website. To DPI systems your traffic looks like a genuine visit to a major site, so there is no suspicious self-signed certificate to flag or block.
Why Xray is good against DPI
Because Xray can hide inside real TLS with Reality and transports like XHTTP, Deep Packet Inspection has almost nothing to grab onto. This is why Xray-based configs stay online in heavily censored networks.
Xray vs V2Ray in practice
For most users the takeaway is simple: Xray is the newer, faster engine, and VLESS + Reality is its flagship setup. If an app mentions Reality or XHTTP, it is almost certainly running on Xray-core.
Veepen runs on the Xray core and fully supports VLESS with Reality and XHTTP, plus VMESS and Shadowsocks. Install Veepen on Android or Android TV, import a config from @veepen_vpn or your own server, and get fast, DPI-resistant connections with one tap.