Vitalik Buterin announced on X that he has deployed 128 ETH each to the teams behind Session and SimpleX Chat. The developer identified these protocols as promising solutions for permissionless account creation and preserving metadata privacy.
Buterin emphasized that while encrypted messaging is critical for digital hygiene, no existing software has reached the perfect balance of security and user experience.
“They have a way to go to get to truly optimal user experience and security. Strong metadata privacy requires decentralization, decentralization is hard,” he wrote.
Vitalik urged the developer community to focus resources on solving these engineering challenges.
The move was met with enthusiasm across the crypto space. One observer noted:
“Vitalik donating 128 eth is peak vitalik. humans round at 100. engineers round at powers of two. 128 is not a “nice number”, it is 2^7 - clean, binary, protocol-coded. looks like it is his way of signalling this is not charity theatre, it is a systems-level investment in privacy infrastructure,” he told.
However, the discussion also touched on hardware limitations.
“You should add that using those apps on regular mobile devices like Apple, Samsung, etc., makes the whole thing useless since the devices are already compromised. You could use your reach in that post to educate people on that point,” one more user wrote.
Others pointed out that network effects remain the biggest hurdle to mass adoption. Convincing a social circle to switch from familiar apps to decentralized alternatives is often significantly harder than solving the technical challenges of encryption.
Read also:
- Crypto Philanthropy: $2B Donations via Blockchain in 2025
- Vitalik Buterin: Institutional Capture Threatens Ethereum
- ‘WhatsApp Killer’: Jack Dorsey Launches Beta Version of Decentralized Offline Messenger Bitchat
- Programmable Privacy: How ZK Tech, AI & User Controls Are Setting the New Standard
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