Tether opens the door to easy creation of P2P apps

Social media is the domain that is ripe for disruption (and has been for quite a while), but a functional alternative is yet to be presented. Will it be Tether that will breathe fresh life into the way we exchange with each other?

Yesterday Tether, the company behind the eponymous stablecoin, its sister company Bitfinex, operating a crypto exchange, and Hypercore, the developer of P2P systems, announced the launch of Keet – a fully encrypted P2P video chat application.

How does Keet work?

Unlike the encrypted, but centralized messaging services like Zoom, Whatsapp or Signal, Keet is, well, peer-to-peer, allowing two or more people connect and exchange media files directly with each other or through a network of peers.

More precisely, Keet users generate and announce their cryptographic public key to the network, allowing other Keet users to locate and, when authorized, connect to each other’s computers. Any peer who received the data can relay it to others, even when the sender is offline.

Touted as more private (using partial information from multiple peers) and more resilient (as the absence of a central server implies), Keet can become the new standard of messaging, but this is not the most interesting part.

A platform to build a P2P internet

Keet is built on Holepunch – a platform aiming at facilitating the creation of P2P applications like Keet. It does not need a common ledger to record all data that passes through the peers, so it does not use the blockchain technology and therefore has no native cryptocurrency.

However, to ensure that crypto payments can be easily integrated into the apps built on Holepunch, the platform foresees built-in APIs that will run, operate, and be powered by the Lightning Network. Unsurprisingly, another coin that will be enabled by Holepunch along with Bitcoin will be Tether.

Holepunch is still completing its alpha testing and will be available in open source in the end of 2022.

Neither Keet, nor Holepunch won’t magically resolve the many problems social media has cumulated so far; but by gradually removing points of centralization, we can move in the right direction, ensuring not only the freedom of payments, but also the freedom of speech.