Decentralised Messaging Platforms Pose Threat to WhatsApp, Telegram?

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta, opened his heart up in a blog post and discussed his vision for WhatsApp. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about. We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp,” he wrote.

Two years later, in 2021, ProPublica, an investigative journalism organisation, made a shocking revelation that Meta (then Facebook) employs about 1,000 WhatsApp moderators whose entire job was to review WhatsApp messages that have been flagged as ‘improper.’ 

This revelation exposed the company’s claim about “end-to-end encryption” of messages sent via WhatsApp. Earlier this week, Signal, a messaging app, revealed in a blog post that Twilio, the company that provides Signal with phone number verification services, suffered a phishing attack. This led attackers to access the phone numbers and SMS verification codes for almost 2,000 Signal users.

E-mails, another widespread way of communicating, is based on an open protocol but its dependency on providers like Gmail, Yahoo and others shifts the control and ownership to the provider. This implies that the provider can read all emails, send emails on the user's behalf, restrict access, or just deactivate the account entirely. The user does not own their most vital Internet communication and login tool!

Amid these concerns, with the rise of blockchain technology, control is reverting into the hands of online users.

Decentralising messaging

A decentralised, end-to-end encrypted messaging app is trustless since it requires no trust from the user. You are certain that your chats are private and safe; no trust is required.

The most secure decentralised end-to-end encrypted messaging applications route communications through a random selection of network nodes. In a decentralised system, third parties cannot compel the network's inventor to divulge information on users, since the entity that developed the network lacks the means to acquire that information. 

Decentralisation also greatly reduces the amount of data that a malevolent third party may obtain if they were to break into the network. To capture any single user's chat data, an attacker would need to get access to the vast majority of nodes on the network, which is far more difficult than simply breaking into a central server. With each new communication, the list of nodes used changes. A rogue node could only acquire data about users' messaging activities for messages routed directly via it—a tiny proportion of the overall network message traffic.

Ukraine war witnesses adoption of Web3 messenger 

Element app, built on a decentralised messaging network called ‘Matrix’, saw a huge upstick in usage when the Ukraine war broke out. Since the app is built on a decentralised network, even if the government shuts off a server, the network can shift to another one. 

The platform is also working on peer-to-peer chat, so users can communicate even via Bluetooth connections with no internet connection necessary. 

This way of communication might affect the speed and the loading time, but the trade-off may be well worth it for users who just want an uninterrupted means to communicate.

Rush to solve the problem

Dm3, Nestree Messenger, Session, Secretum and others are trying to make the existing messaging system safer and build a true end-to-end encrypted messaging application.

According to Dm3, it is simple for users to send a signed, encrypted communication to another ENS domain owner, such as alice.eth, without the need for a single point of failure. The name Alice.eth is peculiar to a person. As long as she protects the linked private key, nobody can steal it from her. Public signing and encryption keys are produced when Dm3 is first used depending on the key in her Ethereum wallet (MetaMask, WalletConnect, and others.). Either the hash of the keys is used to secure the direct connection, or the keys are directly stored as ENS text records. 

The key in the Ethereum wallet can be used at any moment to produce new related private keys.

Secretum, another decentralised messaging platform, claims to offer a substantially higher level of privacy while avoiding the personal and data concerns prevalent in other messaging apps. On Secretum, all information is kept on trustworthy nodes that are connected to our Solana-based Blockchain network.

There has always been a demand for an open-source, interoperable messaging system, but considering the newfound concerns for breach of privacy among users—it is now truly gaining momentum. Twitter is working diligently to transform itself into a decentralised platform as the EU pushes for forcing major platforms to open up their APIs and cooperate. 

It will indeed be interesting to witness whether decentralised messaging is able to successfully build a user base in the context of such shifts.