Are decentralized blockchain messengers a real alternative?

Because the introduction of ICQ — the progenitor of on-line chat functions — the expectation from prompt messaging (IM) providers has by no means modified. Customers merely need them to work, which apparently was a tall order, given the frequent downtimes hottest chat apps expertise these days. 

Launched the identical 12 months as Bitcoin (BTC), WhatsApp is among the most generally used chat apps on the planet. Owned by Meta (the secure of which additionally boasts Instagram and Fb), WhatsApp stands because the epitome of centralized providers. That’s why when the service goes down, it has a wider influence than simply leaving over two billion month-to-month customers scratching their heads and complaining on Twitter.

WhatsApp embodies the qualities of a centralized mindset completely: It has mainstream attain, an business large backs it and regardless of practically one-third of the planet utilizing it, individuals have completely no say over the ultimate product.

Why do centralized chat apps go down?

When a product is managed and managed by a central entity, it tends to comply with sure processes throughout its lifecycle. Somebody has to shoulder full duty for the assorted facets of the centralized product. 

The large scale of the product turns even tiny updates right into a chaos of human errors, database points and never having sufficient time to check the model earlier than pushing out the replace to fulfill stakeholder expectations. Coupled with the quite a few cyber assaults on the infrastructure itself, the extra the service is centralized and managed by a single entity, the extra the “regular suspects of failure” fill the room.

Can decentralized providers repair downtimes?

Communication-focused decentralized apps (DApps), however, present anti-fragile methods, co-founder and CEO of Web3 service supplier Heirloom Nick Dazè instructed Cointelegraph. He stated that decentralized messengers get stronger with each consumer onboarded as a result of they basically operate as “nodes” that hold the system functioning correctly. 

“The important thing distinction is that there’s not one single level of failure,” Dazè said, likening it to a balloon that’s compressed on one half, which turns into geometrically smaller whereas nonetheless containing the air from the compressed part: “All the air nonetheless exists. It’s simply pushed to a distinct part of the balloon.”

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After all, decentralized apps include their very own set of challenges, and one in all them is scaling. DApps can’t compete with centralized providers with out with the ability to tackle a billion-level consumer base, however Dazè believes DApps can overcome scaling points by answering two questions: “The place does all of this information ‘stay?’” and “How will we scale back community spam?”

Addressing the primary subject, Dazè sees public key-based addressing as an honest answer, “Because it serves as a limiting operate on the quantity of information essential to deal with.” Relating to the second subject, Dazè stated that disincentives for spam have to be created, accompanied by Captcha servers.

Redundancy is the secret

Cointelegraph additionally reached out to Chris McCabe, the co-founder of the Oxen Undertaking — recognized for its decentralized IM app Session. When requested how decentralized IM apps deal with crashes and downtimes, McCabe pointed to redundancy: 

“Decentralized networks have a variety of redundancy inbuilt. If one server goes down, one other one is there to take its place.” 

He stated the Oxen Service Node Community, a set of incentivized nodes serving because the infrastructure of Oxen and its choices, has over 1,600 nodes operated by a whole lot of individuals worldwide.

“It will take a catastrophic occasion to take the community down,” McCabe claimed, including that the community is provided to proceed as regular regardless of experiencing main occasions every so often.

“Up to now, we noticed one-fifth of nodes go offline instantly, however Session continued sending messages as regular. The community self-heals, and it hasn’t had a complete freeze of communication as we now have seen with centralized networks.”

Session can presently deal with about 5 million customers — a tiny portion of WhatsApp’s consumer base. Nonetheless, McCabe stated the workforce will proceed to launch updates for a extra intensive decentralized storage community and better community bandwidth.

The Oxen co-founder admitted that whether or not a decentralized community might deal with the site visitors that WhatsApp or Messenger face each day has but to be confirmed. Nonetheless, he’s hopeful that Session might be the primary app to check that principle.

“Session is gaining recognition not solely as a result of it hasn’t gone down,” he summarized, including, “But in addition as a result of persons are sick and uninterested in having their information systematically collected, analyzed and weaponized in opposition to them.” 

Unmanipulated, unreadable and untraceable

The decentralized ecosystem presents a variety of initiatives and apps with totally different priorities. One such is TransferChain, a peer-to-peer messaging app that focuses on privateness. Tuna Özen, the co-founder of TransferChain, instructed Cointelegraph that whereas the scalability facet in decentralization is a grey space, being scalable or non-scalable is the results of design choices. 

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“The primary false impression that drives merchandise to be non-scalable is assuming that any blockchain design can meet all wants,” Özen stated. He instructed that a number of variables together with block quantity, block technology fee, consensus, choice algorithm, token integration, community price and profit construction and community participation construction must be taken under consideration:

“Simply as it’s affordable to anticipate a track-proven race automobile constructed purely for pace to ship the identical efficiency in off-road circumstances, it’s simply as affordable to anticipate a blockchain strategy that’s not particularly designed for services to be scalable.”

Tuna Özen and his workforce describe TransferChain as a cloud platform powered by a decentralized decision-making mechanism on a distributed ledger. The app differs from its centralized counterparts with the place and the way the communication information is saved in addition to the clear storage of the method — which is unmanipulated, unreadable and untraceable in keeping with Özen.

Though decentralized providers provide extra resilient infrastructures, they nonetheless have a protracted solution to go to meet up with their centralized counterparts when it comes to consumer base and mainstream adoption. One other factor to recollect is that as DApps get extra fashionable, they are going to most likely have to face extra regulatory scrutiny and governments worldwide would positively have hassle with this new type of communication — given they solely not too long ago began to get a grasp of the brand new type of cash.