Jack Dorsey Unveils ‘Personal Experiment’ Bluetooth-Based Messaging App
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and the chief executive of Block, on Monday (July 7) introduced Bitchat, an experimental messaging service that lets smartphones trade encrypted texts over Bluetooth rather than the internet.
[contact-form-7]The app, now in beta on Apple’s TestFlight, links nearby phones into a mesh network that relays messages from device to device, allowing conversations to hop across streets and office buildings even when cellular and Wi-Fi signals are unavailable.
CNBC reported that unlike WhatsApp and other mainstream services, Bitchat never routes traffic through company servers and collects no phone numbers or email addresses. Messages reside only on users’ handsets and vanish by default, a design Dorsey says could keep chats alive during blackouts, censorship or heavy surveillance. A technical paper outlining the system is posted on GitHub, and future updates aim to extend its reach with Wi-Fi Direct links.
Dorsey, in a post on X, described Bitchat as a “personal experiment” exploring “Bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things,” as noted by CNBC.
The application includes optional group chats, termed “rooms,” which can be identified by hashtags and protected with passwords. It also incorporates a “store and forward” functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline.
This launch underscores Dorsey’s continued focus on decentralization across various digital domains, including social media and payments, building on his support for projects like Damus and Bluesky.
Bitchat is engineered to maintain functionality even when internet access is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant communication method during outages, shutdowns, or surveillance, similar to Bluetooth-based applications used in past protests. Unlike many mainstream messaging services, Bitchat operates purely peer-to-peer, foregoing accounts, identifiers, and personal data collection.
The project is separate from Dorsey’s companies — Block, Square and the decentralized social-media startup Bluesky — but echoes his long-running push to strip middlemen from digital communications and payments. It lands as Square rolls out an AI assistant for merchants, showing the entrepreneur’s appetite for testing unorthodox technologies across several fronts.
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