In an interview with TechEconomy, Paolo Ardoino, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Keet App speaks on the newly launched, free, and first-of-its-kind peer-to-peer chat app built on the Holepunch framework and uniquely integrated with Bitcoin payment features.
Can you tell me about the main features of the Keet app?
Keet is a free, fully-encrypted chat application that utilises peer-to-peer connections to facilitate real-time audio/video calls, text chat and file sharing. It is powered by an innovative stack of distributed technology, including DHT distributed databases, that allows users to find and connect to each other to form a swarm, on real-world home and office networks.
This technique is called Distributed Holepunching and allows users to locate and connect to each other using only cryptographic key pairs upon authorization.
Keet accomplishes all of this while eliminating the risks of a central point of failure and over reliance on third-party platforms.
Unlike traditional video chat apps, which use cloud-based software or outside servers as intermediaries to connect two or more people, Keet users can initiate a high-quality call directly to another individual’s device. This allows for video chatting to take place without a central server or company operating the network.
Additionally, Keet has a peer-to-peer payment built-in feature that allows for Bitcoin and USDt micropayments . By integrating payments through the Lightning network, our goal is for content creators to be able to monetize the amazing content they create without being dependent on third parties, from the people who consume the content directly to the creators. Keet ALPHA for Windows and Keet Mobile IOS & Android are now officially available.
What was the biggest technical challenge you faced during the development process?
We are a fully peer-to-peer company. We never compromise that idea. We do that because we believe privacy is one of the most important things in this day and age.
This also means we have no shortage of technical challenges, as basically every other communication app out there uses centralised servers. Making devices connect directly with each other, even on home networks, has been something we’ve been working on perfecting for multiple years before launching Keet and was definitely not an easy task.
The same goes for making scalable peer-to-peer data structures that allows the app to query just a subset of the data it needs to display chats, or stream terabytes of file data between users – all encrypted.
One thing we love about solving these problems though, is that once we solved them for Keet, we solved them for any other app out there that wants to build a scalable peer-to-peer app. That’s one of the really exciting things about working at Holepunch – once we solve for one we solve for all.
How did you ensure the security and privacy of users’ messages and data
What sets Keet apart from other chat apps, particularly other video chat apps, is the fact it is purely peer-to-peer. There has, rightfully, been growing concern over user privacy and users giving up control of their data.
That’s why we at Tether and Bitfinex chose to participate in the development of Holepunch together with the Hypercore team, the framework that Keet itself was built on.. Through Holepunch, Keet can establish a more efficient and decentralised connection between peers, while maintaining a high level of security and privacy through encryption.
Both Holepunch and Keet were founded to unlock global communications and empower freedom of speech, access to information and combat censorship around the world. Allowing users to be in control of their own data and communication channels are fundamental to breaking free from technology monopolies.
What are the unique selling points of Keet?
Keet is a free, first-of-its-kind peer-to-peer chat app built on the Holepunch framework and uniquely integrated with Bitcoin payment features.
Unlike other chat apps on the market, Keet is a private and secured peer-to-peer chat app that allows high-quality and real-time audio-video calls and streams as well as the exchange of heavy chunks of files without the norm of a centralised server or any third party.
With Keet, millions of people will be empowered with the freedom of speech, easier access to information as well as having full control of their data and communication channel without worrying about the risk of leakages, hacking, or censorship, because Keet will never ask for users’ data. Keet believes that freedom of choice, communication and finances are the lifeblood of the future, and anything that will enhance those freedoms is worth amplifying.
How did you approach user experience and user interface design?
We are a communications app. That means that there is a certain UX that users expect from similar apps. However, being a peer-to-peer app there have been so many things in UI we have had to rethink which has been a fun challenge. Since there are no servers, the app is never actually unavailable. Messages are stored locally and replicated with peers in your chat as they appear.
This means that when you enter a chat, it’s instant and just shows your latest replicated messages, unlike other centralised apps. As an example, in our recent versions, we worked on the UX around these kinds of things. The app now shows a small indicator when it is looking for new data, which helps users get a sense of what’s happening.
In fact, great UX is one of our biggest priorities in the company. We never want Keet to just be “a peer-to-peer chat app” – we want it to be “the best chat app”. That means having UX that takes advantage of all the power peer-to-peer offers, but by giving it to users in ways where it’s all about the features it provides. Right now I think file sharing in Keet especially reflects this. You can drop any file and it’s instantly shared. Other peers can see the files immediately, and start streaming them immediately. No technobabble needed.
One of the things we love about building Keet, is that it’s an app we use extensively everyday to communicate with the team and friends. That means we are heavy users and get to provide our own feedback both to the internal roadmap but also in terms of what needs improvement or fixing.
As most other companies, we also have a dedicated Q/A team that helps make sure the app has no regressions and tracks whatever bugs appear. Testing peer-to-peer apps is a bit different than testing centralised apps. Since the app is all you need, testing fully end-to-end is a lot easier than normal deployments. We just swarm a prerelease app to our network and have our team test that. Once the testing period is over, we simply update the release app – all over the peer-to-peer network obviously!
Can you tell me about any unique or innovative solutions you implemented in your app
This is a hard question as the entire app is unique and innovative behind the scenes. Similar to how we describe the UX, one of the things we keep loving about Keet is how it presents a really simple interface on top of an extremely novel and innovative engine. Some things that always stand out to us as technical people, is how the entire app itself is distributed peer-to-peer as well.
Once you get the initial installer from the web site, it’s all data swarming between you and the peers. This is truly powerful, as updates are just signed by us, but run directly between users, giving them even more privacy and resilience. This is the same internal engine, Hypercore, that runs chat replication, file replication and more, and this just shows the power of peer-to-peer. We solved general data replication once, and now every aspect of our app is using it.
Bringing the entire peer-to-peer stack to mobile, also required a lot of innovation. In the end we have to develop a completely new runtime for running Javascript based apps on mobile with the capabilities we needed for peer-to-peer, such as networking, file system apis, even timers.
We actually JUST released the latest version of this engine to our mobile app, and it is super exciting to watch that develop and mature.
What are your future plans for the development and improvement of your Keet instant messenger app
Keet is currently in ALPHA, but since the release of Keet mobile we’ve been heavily iterating it and we are getting ready to release the BETA version that incorporates a lot of feedback we’ve been getting from users. BETA runs on a fully new chat engine that we are calling Big Rooms. It allows for chat rooms with hundreds of thousands of users inside, still all fully peer-to-peer. This also includes features like emoji reactions, moderator roles and more. We are super excited to start rolling this out to users soon.
Additionally, we are implementing blind mirroring on top of the Big Rooms engine. Blind mirroring allows any peer to host a fully encrypted live copy of a chat room. With blind mirroring you can have fully private rooms, but you can offline the uptime of the rooms to peers in the network – with no loss of privacy. This is especially exciting for Keet mobile, as it allows you to offload your mobile rooms to other Keet peers, making it really easy to host mobile-only rooms.
We are also expanding our payments options in the app, integrating USDt payments and more. 2023 will definitely be a great year for Keet.
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