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Indra is an attempt to upgrade privacy on the internet, focusing on Bitcoin and Lightning Network, specifically, but launching from that point to become a replacement for Tor.
Indra aims to provide a network secure from large scale surveillance as has been implemented on a large amount of the internet via the privileged position of the USA as the birthplace of the internet, and the weakly reliable TCP protocol, upon which the World Wide Web is built.
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Why Indra?
The author of this application was an early adopter of Tor, his first observation was that the design of Tor was tailored to short lived connections, and not suitable for long lived connections.
The Internet Protocol uses an open, number based scheme where routers pass packets on to their interfaces according to the address range associated with that range. This leads to trunk nodes, which usually then know where to forward a packet to end at the right network interface.
This is an address routing scheme, and is distinct from a source routing scheme where the sender prescribes the path. Tor uses an address routing scheme, and by contrast, Indra uses a source routing scheme.
Source routing is essential for long lived connections, as address routing schemes fail when a node goes offline or becomes unresponsive.
TCP, the main protocol used on the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) assumes stable and reliable paths for its packet routing. This means that every time a node goes offline, the path has to be changed, and the connection will time out, and become unresponsive, causing inconvenience, and potentially danger, to the sender.
The second observation the author made was that the network had a poor design for motivating the addition of new service providers, and sure enough, the history of the network shows that it peaked at around 6000 nodes and has flatlined since then, while the shape of the change of the number of nodes on the network has clearly correlated to Bitcoin full nodes.
UDP is a connectionless protocol, and stands in contrast to TCP. Its' defining difference is that the packets do not associate with a conection and thus if the path changes, due to routers failing, the UDP traffic chooses a different route to the destination address.
There is many "Reliable" UDP connection protocols that have been invented since the inception of TCP, one of the earliest ones being part of the Plan 9 operating system network stack.
Indra is thus a subspecies of the genera of "reliable connection protocols" which the most famous is TCP, but are being gradually supplanted by new "Reliable UDP" protocols because the assumption of a stable path over many hops across a packet routed network becomes more and more inappropriate by the day.
Indra's primary value proposition is the use of source routing combined with UDP and 3 hop anonymising paths in order to provide reliable connections, without telegraphing to observers who have access to many, especially trunk, routers, and to enable routing that is both reliable, as well as impervious to large scale surveillance that can capture network node relationships by their signal volume.