INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack decentralized application platform to build a messaging app
The company is participating in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.On the surface,
Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there
But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it
Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind
It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.&We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global
hackathon in December of last year,& co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me
&We won that hackathon in February.& After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated
Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.Blockstack manages your identity
You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account
Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user
You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages
You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.Every time you message someone, the message is first
encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient cloud provider
Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.All of this is seamless for the end user
It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can&t open and read your messages without your private key
You remain in control of your data
Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.Some features require a certain level
For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications
If you&re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of
decentralized apps (or dapps for short)
For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty
Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don&t work on Blockstack.&We have
dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations
If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that
If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,& Bhardwaj said
&Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.&When you build a digital product, chances are
you&ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point
You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps
Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on
their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.Stealthy is an ambitious company
In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal
It a messaging app, but it also a platform for many other use cases.A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they&ve become
Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking
Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data
And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful
More decentralization is always a good thing.
