Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and stablecoin issuer Tether have collaborated with Hypercore and have collectively created a new platform called Holepunch and launched a fully encrypted peer-to-peer (P2P) video calling application – Keet.
Factoring in Privacy
According to the official press release shared with CryptoPotato, Keet will facilitate real-time audio/video calls, text chat, and file sharing. It is based on 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 via a technique called – Distributed Holepunching.
It essentially enables users to locate and connect using only cryptographic key pairs upon authorization. This approach has been quite popular in a centralized setting, for example, Zoom.
Despite the existence of privacy-oriented solutions, the CTO of Tether and Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino, claims that a ton of metadata can still be collected. Ardoino, who has been appointed as the chief strategy officer (CSO) of Holepunch, commented,
“With Keet, you can talk to family, friends, co-workers, and strangers without the worry of having big-tech or oppressive governments listening to your communications or harvesting your data.”
Holepunch and Keet
The three companies have been reportedly working over the past five years on the project. Additionally, Bitfinex and Tether have also invested nearly $10 million in the development of Holepunch and Keet.
Currently, the Holepunch protocol is closed source and will continue to remain so until the completion of alpha testing to avoid “rogue web3 VC forks and added an altcoin on top of it to milk the crypto community.” It will be moved to open source code in Q4 of 2022.
Ardoino also revealed that a VPN app addition is already on the roadmap.
Holepunch will not rely on any blockchain. Instead, the built-in payments API will run, operate, and be powered by the “layer 2” payment protocol, the Lightning Network (LN). Businesses interested in building their products on the platform will have a default micropayments system that will support Tether tokens. Mathias Buus, CEO of Holepunch Inc., explained,
“Rather than relaying communications through a singular server, the way that most of today’s virtual communications apps do, Holepunch is an open network of computers that can be used by peers to discover each other.”
