Bitfinex and Tether Collaborate on New P2P Video and Chat App for Bitcoin Lightning Payments

Bitfinex and Tether have collaborated with the open source team behind the Hypercore protocol to bring to market the peer-to-peer communications app, Keet. 

Keet allows users to communicate via video, text, and instant file exchange in a true peer-to-peer way and has plans to integrate Bitcoin payments on lightning, as well as USDT.

Below is a one minute promotional video on Keet:

The application improves upon what apps like Zoom and WhatsApp provide to users because data is not being forwarded to a centralized server at any point. Apps utilizing Hypercore Protocol will be faster, more scalable, and secure because it applies signed, append-only logs hosted by individual users.

Another benefit to using peer-to-peer distributed apps like Keet is that it does not leverage inherently inefficient blockchains to process data. Two executives said, “Users have to replicate very little data to join a call — in fact we do a series of advanced indexing techniques to ensure that only a subset of data in these small data structures needs to be replicated,” they added.

The implications of the Holepunch protocol could enable P2P, censorship-resistant streaming applications to be built. All that is required is for the streamer to host their own server is a minimal single board computer like a Raspberry Pi. As viewers join the stream, they begin feeding each other with the streaming data as opposed to services like Twitch and Youtube which rely on centralized servers to mediate data packets. 

The WEB3-Contrarian Trend

The creation of P2P infrastructure without blockchain has emerged as a countertrend to the Web 3 hype instead of tokenizing and putting everything on a blockchain.

One example is Web 5, Jack Dorsey's satirical response to Web 3 and “crypto.” Block’s CEO and co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter claims that the Web 3 model asymmetrically favors venture capitalists at the expense of retail investors and the public for whom the technology was allegedly intended. 

Web 5 leverages Bitcoin and a handful of computer science technologies to create an ecosystem of decentralized identities, data storage, and applications in which the users are in control of their personal information.

The winning model of the decentralized version of the web remains to be seen, however, the model that provides the most value to the end user, and not venture capitalists, is more likely to be successful.