Jack Dorsey releases details of his p2p messaging app Bitchat

The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, announced the launch of a new decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app named Bitchat. The application is currently available on Apple’s beta‐testing service TestFlight. 

On Sunday evening, Dorsey shared Bitchat’s whitepaper along with a TestFlight link for anyone interested in trying the app. He said his weekend project was to learn about “bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.”

Bitchat works without the internet

Bitchat’s whitepaper states that the application doesn’t rely on internet infrastructure. The app uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networks, which provide ephemeral, encrypted communication. This setup ensures the application stays operational even during internet blackouts or censorship.

When somebody sends a message to another user, the message is end-to-end encrypted and it stays in the device memory. No data is saved on a server. Also, using the app doesn’t require a phone number or an email address. This makes Bitchat more private compared to popular messaging apps like WhatsApp that rely on Meta’s data servers. 

Since Bitchat relies on BLE mesh networks, each device acts as both a client and a server. Nearby devices (within 30 meters) form clusters. When a device from one cluster comes into the range of a device from another cluster, they act as a bridge, linking the two groups. This allows messages to hop from cluster to cluster until they reach their intended recipient.  

The whitepaper further dives into the messaging app’s architecture, protocols, and safety mechanisms.

How does Bitchat enhance privacy?

Bitchat injects dummy messages at random intervals of 30–120 seconds and it adds 50–500 milliseconds delays to real transmissions. This makes it statistically impossible for anyone to distinguish genuine messages or correlate timing with user activity.

Messages do not stay in the device’s memory forever. The decentralized app saves any message for 12 hours for regular peers while the time for favorite peers is indefinite. So even if somebody gains access to a device, they can’t trawl through years of old conversations.

Bitchat has no metadata leaks since there’s no centralized servers or a service provider who can see your messages or who you’re talking to. Instead, each node only examines a TTL (time-to-live) counter and a message ID. Nodes do not keep any record of who sent the message, who will get it, or when it was sent—just enough data to know when to stop forwarding.

Bitchat provides uninterruptible communication channels in situations like protests or disaster areas where the internet may be down, overloaded, or actively blocked.

Besides founding Twitter and building Bitchat today, Jack Dorsey co-founded and led Block (formerly Square). He backed decentralized social protocols such as Bluesky and Nostr. In recent years Dorsey drove the development of Web5 and other decentralized applications while advocating for Bitcoin adoption.

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