Coinbase-Backed DeSo Disrupts Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal

October 11, 2022 - 2 min read

Coinbase-Backed DeSo Disrupts Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal - Press Release

Coinbase-Backed DeSo Disrupts Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal

Los Angeles, CA, 11th October, 2022, Chainwire

Takeaways:

  • DeSo, a new blockchain that has raised $200 million from Coinbase, Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz, just launched decentralized on-chain end-to-end encrypted group chats, a first-of-its-kind innovation.

  • On-chain messages are resistant to censorship and can be used pseudonymously without supplying personal information, just like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

  • DeSo is the only blockchain that supports seamless end-to-end encrypted on-chain messaging today, and the extension to group chats is a first-of-its-kind breakthrough.

  • Apps like Diamond, a Decentralized Twitter app that launched recently, are launching decentralized encrypted group chats on DeSo in the coming weeks. Diamond already supports end-to-end encrypted on-chain direct messages, which DeSo has featured since early 2021.

Today, Signal is the most popular private messaging app, and yet users can't use it without entering a personally-identifying piece of information: their phone number. This makes it so that anyone with access to Signal's database gets full information about who the user messaging and when. Additionally, because Signal is a centralized service, it has been blocked in major countries like China.

Imagine if creating a Bitcoin wallet required users to give up their phone numbers. Why can't users have the same level of privacy and censorship resistance that they have with Bitcoin but applied to their communications?

Today, the DeSo blockchain brings Bitcoin's pseudonymity and censorship resistance to messaging with the launch of decentralized end-to-end encrypted on-chain direct messages and group chats.

Thanks to a recent integration with MetaMask, users of DeSo apps like Diamond can sign up without entering any personal information. Additionally, because DeSo is a decentralized layer-1 blockchain, all messages are censorship resistant, meaning that nothing can stop the users recipient from getting their message, even if they're in a country with limited free speech.

“DeSo is the only blockchain that could support something like this today,” says Nader Al-Naji, the creator of DeSo. “It costs about $75 to store a 200-character message on Ethereum, and about fifteen cents to store it on Solana, Avalanche, or Polygon. In contrast, DeSo is one ten-thousandth of a cent, making it the first blockchain capable of disrupting storage-heavy applications like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal,” Al-Naji adds.

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