As an open internet service, all changes must be made via public governance proposals. OpenChat will be owned and managed by the holders of its governance tokens, which will be widely distributed to users across the world to enable decentralized decision-making and incentivize participation on the platform.

OpenChat will become an open internet service once tokenization is enabled on the Internet Computer, which means the dapp will be fully decentralized and governed entirely by the community - no company will be tracking and selling your data. Moreover, while the cost to store 1 GB of data on Ethereum is $60.86 million at the time of writing (after recently peaking at $869 million), costs shall remain stable at around $5 per GB per year on the Internet Computer owing to the extraordinary efficiencies its scalable architecture and “Chain Key” cryptography have unleashed. Never before has it been remotely possible to build such a scalable system on a public blockchain that is inexpensive enough to offer to users for free.

The architecture of OpenChat will allow it to scale to millions of users while remaining free to use for the average user. Your chat messages are processed and maintained on-chain by advanced smart contracts, which in Internet Computer language are sometimes called “canisters,” because they are a bundle of WebAssembly bytecode and persistent memory pages, and run in parallel using the software actor model, which allows dapps to scale. You can try it out the alpha version in development here: This is why we are building OpenChat, a decentralized messaging service that functions much like existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, with a key difference being that OpenChat runs end-to-end on a blockchain, the Internet Computer. Amid the ensuing controversy, the ultimatum changed: if users don’t comply, the messaging app will now gradually degrade in service until it stops operating entirely. Users were told to accept the new policy or risk losing access to their account. Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced an updated privacy policy that requires users to accept that their account details, phone number, metadata, financial transactions, log reports, location, device identifiers, and IP addresses will be shared with Facebook.

Open messaging