Are Decentralized Blockchain Messengers a Real Option?

Since the introduction of ICQ—the progenitor of instant messaging applications—expectations for instant messaging (IM) services have never changed. Users simply want them to work, which apparently became a tall order given the frequent downtime experienced by the most popular chat apps today.

Launched in the same year as Bitcoin (BTC), WhatsApp is one of the most widely used chat apps on the planet. Owned by Meta (the stable that also owns Instagram and Facebook), WhatsApp stands as the epitome of centralized services. That’s why when the service goes down, it has a much wider impact than just leaving over two billion monthly users scratching their heads and complaining on Twitter.

WhatsApp perfectly embodies the qualities of a centralized mindset: It has mainstream reach, an industry giant supports it, and despite nearly a third of the planet using it, people have absolutely no say in the end product.

Why do centralized chat apps crash?

When a product is controlled and managed by a central entity, it tends to follow certain processes during its life cycle. Someone must take full responsibility for the various aspects of the centralized product.

The massive scale of the product turns even small updates into a mess of human error, database issues, and not having enough time to test the version before pushing out the update to meet stakeholder expectations. Along with the many cyber attacks on the infrastructure itself, the more the service is centralized and managed by a single entity, the more the “usual suspects of failure” fill the space.

Can decentralized services fix downtime?

Communication-focused decentralized apps (DApps), on the other hand, provide anti-fragile systems, co-founder and CEO of Web3 service provider Heirloom Nick Dazè told Cointelegraph. He said decentralized messengers get stronger with each user on board because they essentially act as “nodes” that keep the system running smoothly.

“The key difference is that there is no single point of failure,” said Dazè, likening it to a balloon compressed on one part, which becomes geometrically smaller while still containing the air from the compressed part: “All the air still exists. It’s just pushed to another part of the balloon.”

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Of course, decentralized apps come with their own challenges, one of which is scaling. DApps can’t compete with centralized services without being able to take on a billion-level user base, but Dazè believes DApps can overcome scaling issues by answering two questions: “Where does all this data live?” and “How do they” do we reduce spam?”

Regarding the first problem, Dazè sees public key addressing as a decent solution, “Since it serves as a limiting function for the amount of data needed to be handled.” As for the second issue, Dazè said that disincentives for spam, accompanied by Captcha servers, must be created.

Redundancy is the name of the game

Cointelegraph also reached out to Chris McCabe, the co-founder of the Oxen Project – known for its decentralized IM app Session. When asked how decentralized IM apps deal with crashes and downtime, McCabe pointed to redundancy:

“Decentralized networks have a lot of redundancy built in. If one server goes down, another one is there to take its place.”

He said the Oxen Service Node Network, a set of incentivized nodes that serve as the infrastructure for Oxen and its offerings, has over 1,600 nodes operated by hundreds of people worldwide.

“It would take a catastrophic event to bring the network down,” McCabe claimed, adding that the network is equipped to carry on as usual despite experiencing major events from time to time.

“In the past, we saw a fifth of the nodes suddenly go offline, but Session continued to send messages as normal. The network is self-healing, and there hasn’t been a total freeze on communication that we’ve seen with centralized networks.”

Session can currently handle around five million users – a tiny fraction of WhatsApp’s user base. However, McCabe said the team will continue to release updates for a more extensive decentralized storage network and higher network bandwidth.

The Oxen co-founder admitted that whether a decentralized network could handle the traffic that WhatsApp or Messenger faces on a daily basis is yet to be proven. However, he hopes that Session may be the first app to test that theory.

“Session is becoming increasingly popular, not only because it hasn’t gone down,” he summarized, adding, “But also because people are tired of having their data systematically collected, analyzed and weaponized against them.”

Unmanipulated, unreadable and untraceable

The decentralized ecosystem offers a wide range of projects and apps with different priorities. One such is TransferChain, a peer-to-peer messaging app that focuses on privacy. Tuna Özen, co-founder of TransferChain, told Cointelegraph that while the scalability aspect of decentralization is a gray area, being scalable or non-scalable is the result of design decisions.

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“The biggest misconception that drives products to be non-scalable is to assume that any blockchain design can meet all needs,” Özen said. He suggested that several variables including block volume, block generation rate, consensus, selection algorithm, token integration, network cost and utility structure, and network participation structure should be taken into consideration:

“Just as it is reasonable to expect a track-proven race car built solely for speed to deliver the same performance in off-road conditions, it is equally reasonable to expect a blockchain approach not specifically designed for products and services to be scalable.”

Tuna Özen and his team 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 where and how the communication data is stored, as well as the transparent storage of the process – which is unmanipulated, unreadable and untraceable according to Özen.

Although decentralized services offer more robust infrastructures, they still have a long way to go to catch up with their centralized counterparts in terms of user base and mainstream adoption. Another thing to keep in mind is that as DApps become more popular, they will likely need more regulatory scrutiny, and governments around the world will definitely have problems with this new form of communication – given that they only recently started getting an understanding of the new form of money.