Keet, the decentralized communication app – Bitcoin Magazine
Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and USDT stablecoin issuer Tether have partnered with the Hypercore open source protocol team to launch a new peer-to-peer (P2P) communication application, Keet.
Keet allows a given set of parties to exchange instant video, message and file communications in a true P2P manner.
The approach improves on popular end-to-end encrypted but centralized offerings like Zoom and WhatsApp because the data shared is not relayed to a central server at any time; rather, the connection is established exclusively between the users participating in the chat – reducing latency and increasing reliability.
Keet launches its alpha version today and users can download the application on the website. The mobile version of the app is expected to be launched by November 2022.
Holepunch: The Tech Behind Keet
Keet serves as a demo application of what the underlying technology that the three teams have been working on for the past three years, Holepunch, can achieve.
Leveraging BitTorrent-like computer network infrastructure, Holepunch will be fully released to the public as an open source software development kit (SDK) in December 2022. As a nod to “holepunching” – the act of a computer in direct connect to another — the backbone infrastructure aims to make it easier for developers to develop real P2P apps with the Hypercore stack.
Hypercore is a peer-to-peer computing network built on append-only signed logs. These logs work in the same way as a blockchain, but without the consensus algorithm and thus without the need for a global ledger state to be held by all nodes.
Holepunch makes Hypercore more accessible by abstracting away low-level technical details of the protocol. It takes Hypercore one step further by simplifying the architecture and enabling more people to build apps with it – which made it possible for a single front-end developer to build Keet in under four months, told Holepunch Chief Strategy Officer and Bitfinex CTO and Tether, Paolo Ardoino. Bitcoin Magazine.
“Holepunch offers a variety of easy-to-use, collaborative P2P data structures that allow developers to focus mainly on building great apps rather than being network or P2P experts,” Ardoino and Holepunch CEO Mathias Buus said in a joint statement sent to Bitcoin Magazine . “Having built Keet on top of Holepunch, we know firsthand how powerful the platform is, and we can’t wait to see what other developers will build.”
All communication on Keet is encrypted by default, as the app uses asymmetric cryptography. The application generates ED25519 private and public key pairs locally on first launch.
“Keys are generated on the device, all locally, and we are working on adding support for various hardware secure modules (HSMs), such as Ledger, to give users more flexibility,” Ardoino and Buus explained. “This means that in the future users, in addition to keeping the keys on their local device, can store them on external hardware or their phones.”
Public keys are announced to Holepunch’s distributed hash table (DHT), an open network of computers that can be used by peers to discover and connect to each other.
“Our DHT is used both to discover peers (i.e., map a public key to a peer), and to facilitate ‘holepunching,'” Ardoino and Buus said. “In traditional systems, such as WebRTC and others, this happens through a centralized server, which leaks a lot of metadata. With Keet, this happens by using multiple DHT nodes, each of which only has partial information, meaning much less metadata is lost.”
Holepunch completely forgoes using a blockchain and a native token, making it possible to create distributed apps for scalability with minimal resources.
“Instead of relying on a shared blockchain between all users of the app, each user constructs many small data structures” that are used to store the user’s own data as well as those in the same conversation, Ardoino and Buus explained.
“When using blockchains, all of this data must be stored in a large chain, strictly ordered and replicated between all users globally, which makes sense for financial systems like Bitcoin,” they continued. “But for regular apps, it’s often much more efficient to use a bunch of smaller data structures, just to store local data.”
Speaking of Bitcoin, Ardoino told Bitcoin Magazine that the team is working on integrating the ability to send Lightning payments into the SDK. The capabilities of bitcoin in Holepunch apps include allowing users to stream BTC to content creators, making regular P2P payments and tipping. The SDK will also support Tethers USDT.
“Bitcoin and Tether payments are additional features to provide payment rails/options for people using applications built on top of Holepunch or planning to build/offer services through the Holepunch network,” Ardoino and Buus said.
Holepunch will provide primitives to support the digital P2P payment options in a non-custodial form.
“Different from other projects [like] Impervious AI … Holepunch uses pure P2P communication techniques (DHT, distributed holepunching, swarming) … which are decoupled from the payment system to achieve the highest level of freedom in reaching the scalability requirements of a mass communication system,” they added.
Holepunch’s team reimplemented low-level network protocols to independently select the best technology for highly scalable data streams.
“This approach resulted in a very flexible solution, extending from the Merkle log data structures used in Hypercore (which inherently offer data verification and integrity) to a group of small libraries and modules that can be linked together to build high-availability mesh networks” , the executives said.
Ardoino told Bitcoin Magazine that the options currently being considered by the Holepunch team in relation to Lightning integration include integration services such as Blockstream’s Greenlight, which provides affordable, on-demand, but non-custodial Lightning node management. The team is also exploring enabling full Lightning node integration, Ardoino said.
Payments are one facet of communication, Buus and Ardoino highlighted, that can be offered as an optional service to users embarking on P2P, non-stop video, audio or text chats.
“Keet is a good example to explain all of the above. Keet’s goal is to become the most unstoppable communication application, offering a great user experience, with maximum privacy and security,” they said. “This has nothing to do with payments since video/ audio/text chats are pure data streams. Payments in the context of Keet are optional and can be used to tip, pay for live streams, send money to friends and family, etc.”
Keet
In addition to better performance and easier scalability, users also get lower latency and more privacy by using distributed apps like Keet that don’t exploit inherently inefficient blockchains, the two executives said.
“Users need to replicate very little data to join a conversation – in fact, we do a number of advanced indexing techniques to ensure that only a subset of the data in these small data structures needs to be replicated,” they added.
“In Keet you can see this in action, if you do things like share a large file in the chat. When you do, you will notice that it immediately appears to other users, and only when users download the file, the missing parts begin to replicate. Once you have the data, you can help share it with other users, which makes it very scalable.”
Bitcoin Magazine tested Keet before launch by joining a conversation with three people. In a test run, a 3 gigabyte video file was shared by one of the participants, which the other two users were able to start playing in less than a minute.
Keet’s data sharing mechanism leverages concepts made popular by BitTorrent – users download and assemble packets of data to each other in a way that removes the need for the original source to keep feeding information to each new user.
This, a feature of Holepunch itself as mentioned earlier, could for example make it possible to build P2P, censorship-resistant streaming applications with the SDK – which the streamer would be able to host with simple single board computers like a Raspberry Pi. As users join, they start feeding each other streaming data, offloading the host to share their data packets to all viewers—a reality with streaming services like Twitch and YouTube that necessarily rely on centralized servers to deliver.
Keet abstracts most of the work away from the user in a simple but functional and intuitive user interface. It requires access to a microphone and camera, and while privacy-conscious people can disable the in-call camera, the app won’t work without access to it first.
The Web3 contrarian trend
While the Web3 hype that accelerated in the last couple of years has been beating the drum of tokenizing everything and putting everything on a blockchain as the best option to decentralize the internet, a countertrend has recently emerged.
The creation and development of P2P infrastructure that, despite the Web3 fuss, does not utilize blockchain technology at all is picking up.
One such example is Web5, a tongue-in-cheek response to Web3 and the “crypto” of perhaps their most prominent critical, Jack Dorsey. The Block CEO and co-founder and former CEO of Twitter has been vocal about the pitfalls of Web3 — which he claims asymmetrically favors venture capitalists at the expense of retail investors and the public for whom the technology was supposedly intended.
Web5 was announced in June. The initiative, which is being worked on by Block subsidiary TBD, leverages Bitcoin and a host of sound science technologies to create an ecosystem of decentralized identities, data storage and applications where users are in control of their personal information.
Ardoino and Buus claim their solution, Holepunch, is more flexible than Web5.
“Web5, from what we’ve seen so far, has a more complex and predetermined structure than Holepunch,” the duo told Bitcoin Magazine. “Holepunch provides a set of primitives and the scaffolding for building applications without trying to force specific patterns.”
Another chance to create a token-free decentralized web was announced in November by Synonym, a company owned by Tether. Despite the seemingly contradictory nature of Tether having two ventures on the same subject, Ardoino and Buus explained that the offerings could be complementary.
“Synonym can leverage the Holepunch SDK to build parts of their services into the roadmap,” they said. “Synonym and Holepunch are not in competition, but complementary in terms of vision and products they plan to build.”
Which decentralized version of the web will reign as the winner in the future remains to be seen, but surely the one that provides the most value to the end user, not venture capitalists, is more likely to succeed.
