How Bitfinex Launched a Video Chat App with Bitcoin Support
Paolo Ardoino, CTO at crypto exchange Bitfinex, announced the launch of a new peer-to-peer (P2P) video chat app integrated with Bitcoin payment, called Keet. Via Twitter, Ardoino confirmed that the app was built on top of the Holepunch framework, a platform designed to remove friction from the process of building P2P apps, and it will use the Hypercore protocol.
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As Ardoino said, Keet users can interact with friends, family, colleagues and other people. With smaller similar applications, the Holepunch-based app is designed to enable P2P communication without “harvesting” data or listening in on user conversations.
In that sense, Ardoino argued that Keet is a better implementation than even P2P chat apps with privacy features because even these “still collect a ton of metadata”. Bitfinex’s CTO said:
Holepunch comes without strings attached. Developers will be able to build all kinds of apps, headless or user interface, desktop or mobile, without having to worry about central infrastructures. You can watch the video explanation above. Free as in freedom.
Today, the app was released as an Alpha version and the team behind the project is still working on making a better app, Ardoino said. As the app continues to develop, the team behind the project will integrate Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network and Tether (USDT) payments.
Keet will be open source by December 2022. That way, the project will prevent bad actors from allegedly using the source code to create their own version of the app and “milk the crypto community”.
Via Twitter, a pseudonymous user broke down more details about Keet and how it will work. This user said that Keet would not send the data from a chat to centralize servers, but rather it would maintain the data strictly between the two users having a conversation.
Bitcoin supports new use cases away from the control of centralized parties
The user explained that the Holepunch framework has been in development for over 3 years and will be released to the public with Keet’s open source code in December in the form of a development kit. As shown below, the public alpha version of this framework was distributed almost a year ago.
Very happy to release the first public alpha of Hypercore 10 today. It has been quite a journey with a lot of work from myself, @andrewosh and the team. It contains huge improvements across the board
— Mathias Buus 🕳🥊 (@mafintosh) 21 October 2021
As mentioned, the framework is based on the Hypercore protocol that uses Merkle Trees and the BLAKED2b-256 hash function for security. These technologies are “widely used in many distributed systems”, including cryptocurrencies.
The team behind Hypercore also developed a P2P file system called Hyperdrive, and a distributed hash table (DHT) called Hyperswarm.
These technologies allow Holepunch to operate in a decentralized manner without using a blockchain or native token, making the process of creating apps easier for developers. The process of building an app with this architecture is so simple that a “simple frontend developer” created it in 4 months, the pseudonym user wrote while adding:
In the case of Bitcoin, Keet, through Holepunch, will provide primitives to support the P2P payment option in a non-custodial form. BTC and Tether payments are additional features to provide payment rails for people using apps or planning to offer services through Holepunch.
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At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $21,800 with a loss of 4% in the last 24 hours.
