Messaging apps are ubiquitous – more than 3.6 billion people worldwide use them, with the average person sending up to 72 messages every 24 hours. Every day WhatsApp alone channels over 100 billion messages, while WeChat transmits 205 million video messages.
With this popularity has come a darker side: that of hacked personal data, cyber theft, and government violations of privacy. The way messaging apps are designed, work, and are managed exposes them by default to many risks:
- Most messaging apps require the user to input sensitive personal data, including name, phone number, and date of birth.
- WhatsApp, due to its database of user phone numbers, has been used to spread misinformation and fake news.
- Your messaging data is stored on the cloud, where it is not encrypted – leaving it vulnerable to being hacked.
- Many apps use your personal data for their own purposes. Facebook is known to share the data of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp users with advertisers..
- Global surveillance operations of citizens with WhatsApp accounts have been undertaken by governments via the use of spyware.
A recent series of high-profile events have highlighted the size and frequency of the problem:
- In September 2021, the EU’s privacy watchdog fined WhatsApp €255 million for data processing and data sharing violations.
- Telegram, considered the safer option to WhatsApp, suffered a massive data leak in August 2020 that exposed the personal data of over 500 million users.
- The personal data, including email addresses and phone numbers, of over 530 million Facebook Messenger users was stolen by hackers in April 2021.
Furthermore, newer messaging platforms are not addressing the problem effectively. Signal, considered to be a superior alternative to both WhatsApp and Telegram, still uses cloud-based architecture and allows messages to non-users that are non-encrypted.
A real and viable solution may instead be found in the power of Blockchain technology. A team of Lithuanian communication technology experts has recently developed a solution that specifically eliminates all the problems of global messaging platforms. This solution is called Secretum.
Secretum is the world’s first and only decentralised, encrypted messaging app, built on the Solana Blockchain. It offers users a safe, hassle-free, and direct messaging platform, revolving around major technological advantages:
- No servers, no moderators, and complete end-to-end encryption for all messages between users.
- No message data or file storage in a centralised location or on the cloud – only on trusted and independently verified nodes in the Secretum network.
- Users can sign up exclusively with their crypto wallet addresses. No need to share names, birthdates, or any other sensitive data – in other words, total anonymity.
In addition to these advantages as a messaging app, Secretum allows users to trade P2P fungible and non-fungible crypto assets in a cost-effective way, bypassing existing exchanges. Solana, considered the fastest Blockchain in the world, allows Secretum to leverage low gas fees and high block speeds, joining a successful crypto ecosystem with 400+ projects worldwide.
The result is an app that drastically changes the way people communicate via instant messaging, making it safer, more reliable, and more user-friendly than ever before. Secretum has the potential to grow into a globally known, renowned, and used platform – achieving the ubiquity of WhatsApp or Telegram, only without any of their major weaknesses.
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