I believe we are now at the edge of something different. AI gives us, for the first time, a technology that can understand context, language, and nuance well enough to actively help people connect, rather than simply hosting the space where they collide. The next generation of social networks will not be built around feeds. They will be built around introductions, mediation, and shared understanding. The network will not just show you people. It will help you meet them.

From hosting conversations to facilitating them

Every social platform until now has been passive infrastructure. It stores profiles, transports messages, and ranks content. The intelligence in the system was pointed at one question: what will keep this person scrolling. AI changes what the intelligence can be pointed at. A system that understands language can translate between people, not just between tongues but between perspectives. It can notice when two people are saying the same thing in different words. It can slow a conversation down when it is heating up, and summarize a position fairly before the other side responds to a caricature of it.

This is not science fiction. These capabilities exist today. What has been missing is the intent to use them for connection rather than retention. That is a design choice, and it is the choice that will define the next wave of social products.

Bridging what feels unbridgeable

The hardest test for any technology of connection is conflict. Wars between nations, and the divisions they create between communities, produce the exact conditions where human dialogue breaks down. People stop hearing each other. Every statement is read as an attack, and every silence as contempt.

This is where AI can play a role no previous technology could. An AI intermediary does not get tired, does not take sides, and does not need to win. It can let each person be fully heard before anyone is answered. It can find the points of agreement that both sides have stopped being able to see, and present each perspective to the other in language that can actually be received. This is the idea behind Common Ground, an experiment we are building at Nodle. The premise is simple and, I would argue, deeply hopeful: most people on opposite sides of a conflict share far more than the conflict lets them express. Software can help surface that shared ground. It will not end wars. But if it helps even a fraction of people rediscover the humanity of the other side, it will have done something that decades of broadcast media could not.

The intimate frontier: couples, dating, and the conversations we avoid

The same capability that can bridge nations can bridge a kitchen table. Couples counseling works, when people can access it, because a trained third party helps two people hear each other. Access is the problem. Sessions are expensive, waiting lists are long, and many couples seek help only after years of accumulated misunderstanding. AI will not replace human therapists, and it should not try to. But it can be present in the moments when no therapist is available: the argument at eleven at night, the conversation a couple keeps postponing because neither knows how to start it. A patient intermediary that helps each partner articulate what they actually mean, before the other reacts to what they said, could quietly improve millions of relationships.

Dating may change even more profoundly. Today the industry is built on the swipe, a mechanic that reduces people to photographs and optimizes for the volume of matches rather than the quality of any single one. An AI that genuinely understands what you value, how you communicate, and what has worked and failed for you before can make introductions the way a thoughtful friend does. Fewer matches, better ones, and a first conversation that starts with substance instead of small talk.

The same logic applies to professional life. The most valuable business relationships rarely come from cold outreach. They come from a well placed introduction by someone who understands both parties. AI can perform that role at scale, connecting a founder to the right early customer or investor, a researcher to the right collaborator, a local business to the right partner across town.

The missing ingredient: a physical layer

There is a limit to what purely digital connection can achieve. The loneliness statistics of the last decade were produced in the era of the most connected communication tools in history. Something is missing, and I believe that something is proximity. Real community is local. It is the neighbor, the merchant, the parent at the same school, the person standing twenty meters away who shares your interest and whom you will never meet because no system exists to make the introduction.

This is where Nodle occupies an unusual position. For years we have operated one of the largest smartphone powered networks in the world, where everyday phones form a physical mesh that senses and connects the world around them. In its next social update, the Nodle App plans to couple this physical layer with AI driven connection. The idea is to root digital introductions in physical reality: helping people discover the community that already surrounds them, reinforcing local ties rather than replacing them, and making the neighborhood, not the global feed, the primary unit of social life. A connection that can end in a handshake is worth more than a thousand that never leave the screen.

Doing this responsibly

A technology this intimate demands principles this strict. Three seem non negotiable to me. First, privacy by design: the more personal the understanding, the stronger the case for processing that runs local first, on the device, with the person in control of what leaves it. Second, human agency: AI should introduce and then step back. It is a facilitator, not a participant, and never a substitute for the human relationship itself. Third, honest incentives: a network designed for connection must measure success in relationships formed and understanding reached, not in hours captured.

The opportunity in front of us

Every previous generation of social technology was shaped by what the technology could do. The feed exists because ranking content was what the machines of that era were good at. The machines of this era are good at something far more valuable. They can understand us well enough to help us understand each other.

That capability can be pointed at engagement, as before. Or it can be pointed at the oldest and most human problem there is: how to bring people together across distance, difference, and disagreement. At Nodle, we are betting on the second path. 

The next social network will not be the one that holds your attention the longest. It will be the one that introduces you to the people, near and far, who were waiting to be found.

For most of my career I have been building toward a single idea. The tools that run our lives should belong to the people who use them, not to the handful of companies that sit between us and everything we want to do.

I have written about free networks, about taking the middlemen out of systems that never needed them, and about peer to peer technology that lets people connect directly without a gatekeeper standing in the way. I have argued that the internet, now past fifty years old, deserves a new economic model. I have made the case that artificial intelligence, decentralized money, and shared networks were quietly converging into something far larger than any one of them on its own.

Along the way, Nodle built three of those pieces. A network that no single company owns, carried by the phones already in everyone’s pocket. A way to hold and move money without asking anyone for permission. And a way to communicate privately with no central server.

There was always one piece missing. Your intelligence.

The future of AI is not bigger. It is closer.

Almost every time you ask an AI a question today, your words leave your phone, travel to a data center owned by a few large companies, and come back. It is fast and convenient. It also means that the most personal tool you own, the one you trust with your symptoms, your finances, and your half formed thoughts late at night, actually runs on someone else’s computer. And when the connection drops on a plane, in a tunnel, or anywhere off the grid, it simply stops.

I think that is backwards. The most personal software we use should run on the most personal computer we own, which is the phone already in our hand.

Meet the Turtle

Today, version 4 of the Nodle App brings that idea to life. We have been raising a local AI under the code name the Turtle, with a playful mock species name, Chelonia portabilis, the pocket dwelling model. The name carries a real point. A turtle never leaves home, because it is home. Its intelligence travels with it, intact, whether or not there is a signal in range.

Here is what that means in practice. The Turtle is powered by Gemma 4 and it runs entirely on your device. It works offline, on a plane, in a tunnel, or anywhere with no signal at all. It drafts your emails, reads your calendar, and searches your photos without ever uploading a single one of them. It uses roughly the energy of one phone charge rather than the power and water a data center spends on every prompt. And because it runs on hardware you already own, it is free to use, with no per question meter.

One nuance matters, and I want to be precise about it. The Turtle is local first, not local only. You can still reach for the cloud when a task genuinely calls for it and you choose to. The difference is that the default keeps your life on your device, and the choice stays with you.

What local AI unlocks for you: performance + privacy

Have you ever been talking to your AI in the car and hit a dead spot in the cell network, only to have the conversation grind to a halt and the AI become confused? When AI is running locally, this doesn’t happen, and responses are nearly instantaneous. That changes the tenor of conversations entirely. It also means that for the most critical conversations you might have at a doctor’s office or when you’re trying to make a fast decision, you get a fast response. Not only is the response fast, but it’s completely private and never leaves your device. Together, we believe this combination will finally make AI a true personal assistant that can work in almost any situation. Here are some examples.

In healthcare, the most sensitive data you have is also the worst thing to upload to a stranger’s server. A model on the device can help interpret symptoms or support a community health worker in a village with no specialist, without a single byte of health data leaving the phone.

In education, a patient and private tutor in any language can run on a modest phone with no subscription and no connection. A child in a classroom with no broadband gets the same tireless guide as one in a wealthy district, and they can ask questions they would never raise in front of a class.

In an important work meeting, making your boss wait for an answer while the AI churns is both painful and looks pretty bad. With local AI, this never happens.

Having the choice to keep your conversation private in everyday wellbeing, journaling, reflection, or when talking through a hard day is a big plus. A local model can be a companion that cannot report back, profile your moods, or leak your lowest moment in a breach.

Own your network, your money, your communications, and now your intelligence

This completes a simple and stubborn idea I have held for years. You should own the things that matter most.

Own your network. The Nodle mesh is owned by no one and carried by everyone, connecting over short range radio even when the wider internet is down.

Own your money. With self custody, the keys are yours and there is no one to ask permission from. I frame this as ownership, not as a promise of invulnerability. Ownership is the honest claim, and it is the one that lasts.

Own your communications. Messages that travel through a decentralized infrastructure, not through a server that logs them.

And the final piece: Own your intelligence. An assistant that is yours, on hardware you already paid for, answering only to you, and tuned specifically to your needs over time.

One turtle is resilient. A million are unstoppable.

Nodle already turns ordinary phones into a decentralized network of millions of portable nodes. The Turtle gives each of those nodes a mind. Shell by shell, they interlock into intelligence that is everywhere, owned by no one, and answerable to everyone who runs it.

Centralized AI asks you to trust a tower you cannot see. The Turtle does not ask for that trust at all. It stays with you, works anywhere, and belongs to you. That is not a smaller ambition. It is a wiser one.

The shell is the network. Version 4 of the Nodle App is live today.

Come and raise your Turtle.

In the past I wrote about how Skype’s disruption of telecom holds the blueprint for what blockchain is doing to finance. This week, we shipped the product I described in that post. And we put it in your pocket.

In April last year, I published a piece arguing that finance is at the same inflection point telecom faced in 2005. I wrote about peer-to-peer scaling, zero-knowledge proofs, the dramatic cost reduction that comes when intermediaries lose their gatekeeping power, and the new financial primitives that this stack makes possible: stablecoin accounts opened from a phone in a small African town, undercollateralized lending, on-chain credit scoring without disclosing personal financial history.

I closed that piece with an invitation: to witness, and perhaps to participate in, the second revolution.

This week we shipped the product. But before I describe it, I want to revisit something I undersold in my previous piece.

Skype was not a calling app.

By the time Skype captured 40% of global international traffic, it had become voice, video, messaging, file sharing, group communication, screen sharing, and the connection layer between the open internet and the regulated telecom system. It started as one feature and became the place you didn’t leave to do anything else communication-related. We did not have the word for it at the time. Skype was the first consumer superapp in telecom.

The same pattern will hold for finance. The endpoint of the second revolution is not a wallet. The endpoint is a superapp. A single place where you hold money, swap it, spend it, earn it, send it, gift it, message about it, and prove things about it without ever leaving the app.

That is what Nodle App Version 4.0 is.

Before I describe it

I want to be careful with what I claim here. I am not telling you we built the most feature-complete crypto app on the market. Coinbase has a head start on fiat on-ramps. MetaMask has years of chain coverage. Revolut has years of regulated banking. We will not catch up on all of that tomorrow.

What I am telling you is that we built the first app where the primitives that actually matter for the second revolution live in the same place: stablecoins, self-custody, an AI agent that does not leak your data, a token economy where the app pays you for being in the network, messaging, gifting, and the BLE infrastructure layer underneath it all.

Four pillars hold the product up. Let me walk you through them.

1. Stablecoins, swaps, and the wallet that pays you back

Every wallet you have ever used is a cost center. You pay gas. You pay spread on swaps. You pay custody risk. Even the “free” ones are extracting from you in ways you don’t see on the screen.

Nodle App inverts that. The phone in your pocket, just by running the app and contributing to our decentralized Bluetooth network, earns NODL. The same network that powers Roole’s stolen vehicle recovery in France, that scans Paragon ID’s battery-free asset tracking tags, that secures chain-of-custody for last-mile package delivery. You are not a user of that network. You are a node in it. And nodes get paid.

This was true in earlier versions of the app. What changed in Version 4.0 is that the loop now closes. Earn NODL. Hold it. Swap it for USDC or other stablecoins inside the app. Spend it. Or send it. All in one place.

That is the earn-to-spend loop I keep talking about with crypto audiences. With stablecoin support inside the same surface, it is also the cleanest answer I have ever been able to give to the question that has dogged this industry for a decade.

How does someone in Lagos, São Paulo, or Manila hold US dollars on their phone without a US bank account? They earn. They swap to USDC. They hold dollars.

2. Self-custody, without the self-custody headache

The two largest barriers to wallet adoption are mirror images of each other.

For CEX users, the people whose money sits on Coinbase or Binance, the barrier is fear. Fear of seed phrases, fear of irreversible mistakes, fear of bricking the funds. They stay on the exchange even after FTX, even after Celsius, even after the long parade of “the withdrawal page is temporarily unavailable” notices.

For MetaMask and Phantom users, the barrier is friction. Importing assets across chains, paying gas to move things around, dealing with five different swap interfaces.

Mesh Pay, our new partner integrated into Version 4.0, dissolves both barriers. You can pull your assets in from Coinbase, Binance, MetaMask, Phantom, and a long list of others, without copying seed phrases, without manual chain bridging. The first time you open the new app and bring everything over, the experience feels like a CEX. The reality is that you now hold your own keys.

This is what Skype-Out did in 2004 for telecom. The user kept the experience they were used to (placing a call to a regular phone number) but the underlying economics had been rewritten. Nodle App does the same thing for your self custody wallet. The wrapper feels familiar. The substrate is new.

3. An AI agent that runs on your phone, not on someone’s server

Every “AI wallet” you have heard about routes your prompts (and by extension your portfolio, your intent, your behavior) through OpenAI or Anthropic or some other inference provider. That is a fine tradeoff for asking an AI to summarize a PDF. It is a strange tradeoff for asking an AI about your money.

Nodle App Version 4.0 ships with an on-device AI agent. The model runs locally on your phone. Your questions, your balances, your spending patterns, your goals. None of that leaves the device unless you choose to send it somewhere.

For privacy-first crypto users, this is the moat. For the much larger audience that no longer trusts Big Tech with their finances but does not yet have a good alternative, I think this is the first product that gives them one.

It is also the most direct expression of a principle I have believed since the Skype days: the value of decentralized architecture is not just that it is cheaper. It is that it removes a class of trust assumption entirely.

4. A wallet that is also a chat, a gifting layer, and a network

This is where Nodle App stops being a wallet and starts being a superapp.

Messaging. Inside the app, you can message anyone in the network. End-to-end encrypted, quantum resistant messaging. No SIM card required, no phone number attached to the conversation, no Big Tech intermediary. The same conversations where you decide to send someone money now happen in the same app where you send the money.

Gifting. Send a token, send an NFT, send a stablecoin payment wrapped in a digital envelope. We built this for the cultural moments where money carries emotional weight. A graduation. A wedding. Lunar New Year. A child’s birthday. The envelope makes the transfer feel like a gift, not a transaction. It is the first time I have seen the cultural ritual of giving money show up inside a crypto product the way it shows up inside WeChat or Line.

Network participation. When you install Nodle App, you are not just downloading another wallet. Your phone becomes a node in a global decentralized Bluetooth Low Energy network operated by smartphones. The network already powers real enterprise use cases: vehicle recovery, asset tracking, last-mile delivery integrity, content provenance through ContentSign. The wallet is the consumer-facing surface of an infrastructure layer that already has commercial customers, real revenue, and a working token economy.

In the Skype analogy, this is the part most observers missed in 2004. They thought Skype was a free calling app. They did not yet see that what Skype had actually built was a decentralized routing network with global reach, and that the free calls were the gateway drug into voice, video, messaging, file sharing, and eventually a category that did not yet have a name.

Nodle App is the wallet. The superapp is the surface. The network is the substrate.

Where this fits in the larger pattern

In April last year I wrote about how a user in Lagos or São Paulo could open a US dollar account, receive stablecoins, spend through a virtual card, and access undercollateralized credit on the strength of privately verified financial history. Every one of those primitives is currently being shipped, by us or by partners we are working with, into the Nodle Superapp over the next several releases.

The point I want to leave you with is not that Version 4.0 is the endpoint of that vision. It is not. It is the first version of an app where all of these primitives can live together in one place. Where the network that earns the tokens you spend is the same network you participate in. Where your keys, your data, your AI agent, your chats, and your gifts are yours.

If you have been waiting for the moment to participate in the biggest revolution in decentralized finance rather than just watch it from the sidelines, this is a good place to start.

Download Nodle App on the App Store or Google Play.

The cryptographic foundation of any new social network should be among its first principles. Its cryptographic foundation shouldn’t be a feature — it should be a commitment made real.

There is a huge difference between a policy-based privacy or right to privacy and a math-based privacy. Governments can pass laws. Platforms can write policies. But no one has ever passed a law that changed the outcome of a mathematical proof. That is what it means for privacy to be structural rather than promised.

Mathematics is the only language that no platform or organization can rewrite, and no terms of service can override. A mathematical proof does not have a privacy policy. It does not have a CEO. It simply holds indifferently, permanently, for everyone who checks it.

Exposure Notification (GAEN), a good example of the use of cryptography at scale

During COVID-19, my team and I saw the first contact tracing solution being marketed by the Government of Singapore. It was amazing to see how bluetooth, peer to peer technologies and mobile mesh could be leveraged for containing the spread of a virus. The last time they were used at scale it was when our messaging app, FireChat, was used by most pro-democracy movement around the world between 2014 and 2016.

Singapore solution was built by the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. Work began on January 23rd 2020, the same day Singapore detected its first imported COVID-19 case. The underlying protocol was named BlueTrace, and the open-source reference implementation was released as OpenTraceunder GPL-3.0. Australia (COVIDSafe). BlueTrace’s centralized reporting was the single most contested design choice. In a centralised report processing protocol, a user must upload their entire contact log to a health authority server, which is then responsible for matching log entries to contact details, ascertaining potential contact, and warning users. GovTech explicitly defended the hybrid choice on epidemiological grounds, the team emphasized that TraceTogether would ‘complement contact tracing, and is not a substitute for professional judgement and human involvement in contact tracing’, and that the hybrid model worked for Singapore and was built specifically for Singapore.

We saw a possible alternative that would protect people’s privacy

The alternative was a decentralized processing developed by the 

Nodle

 team and called Whisper Tracing Protocol. It was developped together with the open source community and along other open source solutions like TCN and DP-3T. Our approaches were enabling the client to upload interaction tokens from which encounters can be derived, and individual devices (smartphones) were checking these tokens against their local logs. It is ultimately the solution Apple and Google decided to implement even if it took them 5 months to deploy/roll-out GAEN (Google/Apple Exposure Notification) to the market.

Available Privacy Layers

Whisper Tracing Protocol

Whisper Tracing Protocol is one way to keep a social graph private and make sure each participating user keeps total sovereignty over their contacts and interactions.

Encrypted address book interactions

The Signal app core idea around address book contacts is that the server should be able to tell you which of your contacts are on Signal without actually learning who your contacts are.

That’s how they do it:

• Your phone establishes an encrypted connection directly to the enclave, (Signal runs the contact-matching code inside a special sealed compartment on their servers called an SGX enclave, Intel’s hardware feature. Think of it as a tamper-proof black box inside the server not to Signal’s regular servers.)

• The enclave can prove to your phone — cryptographically — that it is running exactly the published open-source code and nothing else (this is called “remote attestation”)

• Even Signal’s own engineers and system administrators can’t peek inside the enclave while it is running

• The enclave does the matching and returns only the intersection

The honest caveats of Signal app secure enclave:

• SGX has had side-channel vulnerabilities discovered over the years. It is not magic; it is “very hard to break” rather than “mathematically impossible to break.”

• You still trust that the attestation process is honest and that the published code matches what’s deployed.

A possible alternative and new approach is essentially taking the step Signal deferred: replace the hardware enclave with cryptographic primitives that don’t require trusting any hardware vendor.

Zero Knowledge Proofs

If any system can look up “this device belongs to this person”, the whole privacy guarantee collapses. One breach, one subpoena, one misaligned executive, and the map of your physical movements becomes attached to your name.

Zero-knowledge proofs can keep your location and identity layers permanently separated. It allows the system to verify that an enrolled user was in a specific location at a given time with another user without the server ever holding the link between them, without ever knowing who they are.

The connection can be proven without being revealed. That distinction is not technical nuance. It is the difference between a system that protects you and one that merely promises to.

The Sovereign Architecture

Davidson and Rees-Mogg who wrote The Sovereign Individual argued that the sovereign individual would be defined by the ability to transact, exist, and move through the world without dependence on institutions for permission. Digital identity has always been the missing piece of that argument. Every online identity until now has been issued by an institution, a platform, a government, a service provider and therefore subject to their continued goodwill.

A DID-anchored identity is one proposed architecture that makes genuine digital sovereignty possible at the identity layer. Your identifier exists on an open, decentralized ledger. Your profile is cryptographically signed by a key only you hold. No institution stands between you and your own identity. That is not a feature. It is a different relationship between a person and the digital world entirely.

The core DID v1.0 specification was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and reached “Recommendation” status in July 2022. Among its authors the paper mentioned 

Christopher Allen

 who recently wrote a piece on Self Sovereign Computing https://x.com/ChristopherA/status/2043517199667937376

The proximity layer knows where you interacted with somoeone. The address book layer knows the edges of your social world. The identity layer knows who you are. Each one protected by mathematics that no platform can override and no breach can unwind.

This is not a privacy feature. It is a foundation. Everything built on top of it, the matching, the serendipity, the genuine human connections inherits that permanence.

If you want to experience what genuine sovereign identity feels like in a social context and contribute to the research on how people actually connect the engine is open. Five minutes. Your relational pattern, mapped and returned to you: → dipity.nodle.com

If you missed on the previous posts about “The One Person Social Network”, find links to part 1 and part 2 below:

The One Person Social Network — Part 1
Can a new generation of social networks save the fabric of our society?

The One Person Social Network — Part 2
The importance of the social graph and how it could be leveraged for more serendipity

Image from Ryoji Ikeda art installation in Sydney, Australia — July 3, 2018

In the early days of Facebook, during a pivotal era Mark Zuckerberg was obsessed with mapping the world “social graph”. In February 2010, Facebook acquired Octazen. Octazen was the industry leader in “Contact Importing”technology. They provided a “white-label” service (API) that allowed hundreds of other startups and social networks to let their users find friends by logging into their webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and scraping their address books. Once acquired by Facebook all third party APIs were stopped.

Mark Zuckerberg himself had reportedly called Octazen’s tool “the primary source of growth” for the social network.

That tool was so valuable because it gave Facebook access to your social graph — the map of who you already know. Once they had it, they had you.

The social graph was never designed to help you meet the right person. It was designed to keep you engaged with the people you already know.

The map of who you already know contains something valuable — latent signal about the edges of your world, the people one step beyond your current reach. The problem is who controls that data, and what they do with it. A different architecture can use that same signal to serve you rather than sell you — privately without any of it ever leaving your hands.

What does it actually feel like when serendipity works?

Genuine serendipity has a specific texture. It doesn’t feel like a recommendation. It doesn’t feel like an algorithm. It feels like the universe being slightly better organized than you expected. You meet someone and within ten minutes you realize you have been circling the same questions from opposite directions. That feeling is not magic. It is pattern recognition operating below the threshold of conscious awareness. What should be built is a system that makes that pattern visible so it could be transformed into a new connection opportunity and a new conversation ahead of any potential meeting.

When you remove the social graph as the primary filter, something unexpected happens. The people the engine surfaces are not the people you would have thought to look for. They are not in your industry. They are not necessarily connected to anyone you know. But they keep appearing in the same physical spaces as you, the same coffee shop on Tuesday mornings, the same neighborhood at the same hour. They were already in your world. The platform just couldn’t see them because there was no existing line to traverse.

The contrast with engineered discovery on existing platforms

Spotify, for example, can tell you what song you will like next because your taste in music is relatively stable and bounded. But a person is not a playlist. The dimensions along which two people might resonate are vast, contextual, and often invisible even to themselves. What makes a connection genuinely serendipitous is precisely that neither party could have predicted it — not because the match was random, but because the signal that made it possible existed below the surface of anything either person had consciously expressed.

Serendipity is not about randomness. It is about access to a layer of reality that existing platforms are architecturally incapable of reaching.

Next week I will get into the technical foundation that makes this possible and why none of it depends on trusting a platform to keep its promises.

In the event you missed the first post from this serie about The One Person Social Network: https://anthenor.com/the-one-person-social-network

If you have not done it already and if you have some time, feel free to advance my research on how people like to connect by doing this test and get a summary of your relational pattern: https://dipity.nodle.com

How do we spark connections between people that feel genuinely human. Connections that bypass the swipe, the scroll, the screen — the whole machinery that passes for social interaction today but doesn’t really reflect how human beings actually connect with each other?

At the same time, it is easy to notice how people are increasingly uneasy about what the big tech platforms, and more specifically existing social networks, do with their data. How it is collected, how it is used, how it is monetized — often without any real transparency, and certainly without giving anything meaningful back to the people generating it.

These two things — the crisis of genuine human connections, and the extractive logic of centralized platforms — are not unrelated. They are two symptoms of the same underlying problem. Existing platforms don’t care about true connections, their goal is to distract us in order to extract as much attention they can and seek more profits.

Every social network is built primarily for advertisers, not individuals, their reward function is not connection but attention.

The Concentration Problem Is Just Growing With AI

The conversation around AI safety often focuses on existential risk or regulatory gaps. But there is another dimension that doesn’t get enough attention: the danger of having this much psychological power concentrated in the hands of a few large social networks and AI platforms.

Modern AI models are extraordinarily good at understanding the psychological profile of a person. If the intent behind that capability is even slightly misaligned — if there is a hidden purpose to nudge people toward certain beliefs, certain behaviors, certain ways of seeing the world — then AI platforms and social networks with hundreds of millions or billion of users are carrying an almost incomprehensible responsibility. Right now, most of that responsibility is unaccountable. I understood this pretty early one when I created and launched  Replika with Eugenia Kuyda

In 1997, Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote The Sovereign Individual — predicting that the information age would fundamentally invert the power relationship between institutions and individuals. That technology would give people the ability to operate, transact, and exist outside the centralized structures that had historically controlled them. They were right. We are living in the early chapters of that liberation.

Your Personal AI And Your Private Social Graph Could Flip Existing Models

Today we have LLM models that can run directly on your phone. Models that carry an encoding of vast human knowledge — accessible at your fingertips, even offline. And crucially: models that can be yours. Owned by you. Trained with your data, which you also own. A genuine intelligence in your pocket, learning continuously from you, with you and for you.

This isn’t just a privacy argument, though privacy matters. It is something bigger. An on-device AI that belongs to you can help you understand yourself better. It can make sense of your social world, your environment, your daily rhythms, your interactions with people. It can be a real companion — one that accumulates authentic knowledge about your life, held locally, owned entirely by you.

That’s a fundamentally different proposition than anything the large social networks and AI platforms are offering. And I don’t think we have fully reckoned with what it means.

A Sovereign Architecture For Each Individual

One person, with a smartphone, with their own intelligence, their own data, their own learning loop. Not a node in someone else’s network. Not a data point in someone else’s model. An autonomous person, with a tool that serves them — and only them.

That one person is a social network.

Their connections, their relationships, their serendipitous encounters, their social graph — all of it can be enriched by intelligence that belongs to them, without surrendering anything to a platform in exchange while protecting any data that is exchanged with modern cryptography.

That’s what keeps me up night these days, and I think it is one of the most important problems worth cracking right now. We are at an inflection point.

If this resonates with you, please reach out!

And if you have some time, feel free to advance my research on how people like to connect by doing this test and get a summary of your relational pattern: https://dipity.nodle.com

Post originally posted on my Medium anthenor.medium.com

Back then, I remember playing with Wi-Fi Aware on prototype smartphones from the team that participated in the creation of this new wireless standard. We had to wait “only” 10 years to see it come to iOS and to finally fulfill the promises of interoperability between Android and iOS for building longer-range, high-bandwidth, and more stable mesh networks on mobile.

Bitchat Wi-Fi Aware implementation

It is exciting to see the recent progress of bitchat from Jack Dorsey and that mobile mesh still has an appeal as a technology for local chat and very likely multiple other applications. 

Contrary to BLE, Wi-Fi Aware was purposefully built for building mesh networks on smartphones. Here is a quick overview of the benefits of Wi-Fi Aware in this Comparative Analysis of Wi-Fi Aware and BLE Mesh for Smartphone-Exclusive Mesh Networks.

The Nodle team made a first implementation of Bitchat using Wi-Fi Aware instead of BLE so the difference in stability and performance can be appreciated. An Android version of the SDK is available here for tests: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CutOJtS6eivGCLAGykwsR7cQtSAjt_A1/view and the code can be accessed on GitHub.

We were able to get up to five devices with Wi-Fi Aware support connecting simultaneously, and it worked great. The mesh is quite stable — much more than the BLE one.

We started to test interoperability between iOS and Android with a version for iPhones, but the Wi-Fi Aware version that has been recently shipped with Apple’s new iOS doesn’t yet match the standard specifications. Therefore, it will require a bit of time and work on Apple’s side so it can work as well as on Android and enable interoperability as it claims.

You can bump our ticket on the Apple Developer forum to accelerate the delivery of a fix by Apple engineers to enable seamless interoperability here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/800453

If you want to contribute and improve the current Android implementation, you can participate on GitHub here: https://github.com/NodleCode/wifi-aware/tree/main/bitchat-version-on-android-using-Wi-Fi-Aware

Luckily, one of my business partner’s sisters was married to Niklas Zennström, one of the two Skype founders. We met in Biot, in the south of France, so I could demo our service. It was not live yet, and the first comment from Niklas was: “Just ship. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. You will improve it with your users.”

I was fascinated by peer-to-peer architectures and decentralized technologies. Skype was really what got me deep into these technologies. I was researching and learning about distributed hash tables (DHT), decentralized storage and routing, self-healing overlay networks, how messages and calls could be dynamically routed even without centralized knowledge of the entire network.

This was still years before Ethereum and Bitcoin was invented. Encryption was managing trust.

As Niklas and I were about to end our meeting, he mentioned: “Do you know anyone who could help us open the service of Skype Out to route calls from Skype to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) to enable Skype users to terminate calls to landline and mobile phones?” 
Telecom routes leveraging VoIP were my bread and butter at the time, and the way I was financing all my research and development.

I replied to Niklas: “If that’s what you need, I can enable it tomorrow.” Then he asked, “Can you be in our London office next week?” 
I flew to London the following Monday and after meeting with the Skype team, signed the first telecom agreement to route all their calls to the PSTN.

Back in 2004, Skype was perceived as a foe to the whole telecom industry and no incumbent wanted to let them operate and capture the value provided by regulated telcos. Each country has its own regulator, its own set of rules and the government directly captures a share of the value by leasing wireless spectrum or numbering resources. I didn’t care about any of that, began setting up the switch and a few years later even applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU in Switzerland) to get my own country code.

In just 10 years, Skype’s market share of global PSTN traffic went from less than 3% to 40% of all international calls worldwide at its peak.

My experience with Skype wasn’t just a career milestone — it was a front-row seat to how decentralized technologies can transform an entire industry. Today, I’m witnessing the same patterns emerge in finance, with blockchain technologies poised to create an equally dramatic shift in how we exchange value.

Let me explain below what are the similarities and why the timing is now for a new generation of applications to take over global finance by storm.

Decentralized technologies, blockchain scalability and security

Skype was able to scale and experience a peak with 34 million concurrent users being online in 2012.

Scalability

Despite the resistance from the financial industry and many critics to adopt blockchain technologies and arguing that it can’t handle the necessary volume of transactions, Ethereum layer 2 and zero knowledge proofs (“ZKPs”) are demonstrating that there is practically no limit today. 
Visa’s actual TPS (transaction per second) is around 1,700 (not the often claimed 24,000 TPS)*, Mastercard processes approximately 5,000 TPS**. 
Polkadot throughput is currently around 1,000 TPS, but recent tests have demonstrated over 100,000 TPS. And, ZK Rollups (Layer 2) with solutions like Polygon zkEVM or like ZKsync Era are expected to reach between 2,000 and 3,000 TPS later this year. 

The big plus is blockchain technology offers advantages beyond raw transaction speed, including programmability, accessibility, and reduced intermediaries.

Why Zero Knowledge Layer 2s are as significant as P2P was for the telecom industry

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology revolutionized telecommunications by eliminating the need for centralized infrastructure to connect calls. Before Skype, international calls required a complex network of physical switches, copper wires, and satellite connections — all controlled by telecom operators who charged hefty fees for access. P2P allowed calls to route directly between users over the internet, bypassing this expensive infrastructure entirely.

Zero-knowledge proofs are significant as they allow one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true without revealing any additional information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For blockchain transactions, this means a complex calculation can be verified as correct without redoing the entire calculation. In the world of business and finance, this means unmatched scalability and speed.

Zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain represent a similar paradigm shift for finance for several key reasons

1. Elimination of Trust Requirements
   Just as P2P eliminated the need to trust telecom operators to connect your call, ZKPs and blockchain eliminate the need to trust financial intermediaries to verify transactions.

2. Dramatic Cost Reduction
   P2P reduced the cost of international calls by 95%+. Similarly, ZKPs reduce the cost of financial transactions by allowing thousands of transactions to be verified for the cost of a single verification on traditional systems.

3. Scalability Without Centralization 
   P2P allowed Skype to scale to tens of millions of concurrent users without building massive central infrastructure. ZKPs allow blockchain networks to scale to thousands of transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization.

4. Privacy Preservation
   P2P with encryption allowed private communications that couldn’t be easily monitored by governments or companies. ZKPs allow financial transactions that preserve privacy.

5. Composability 
   P2P enabled new services to be built on top of the basic communication layer (video, file sharing, etc.). ZKPs and blockchain enable complex financial services to be built on top of the basic transaction layer without compromising performance (Smart Contracts, Transactional Ai Agents, Trading bots, etc.)

The significance cannot be overstated: just as P2P technology made international communication accessible to everyone regardless of location or income, ZKPs and blockchain are making sophisticated financial services accessible to everyone regardless of their access to traditional banking infrastructure.

Security

Most financial institutions would argue that it is not secure to let users hold their funds. If this used to be a valid argument, one could argue that nonetheless blockchains do enable an easier traceability of payments and money movements since records are public and verifiable by anyone. The recent tragic event I describe below explains why this traceability of funds is now making it almost impossible for attackers to steal the money on your crypto wallet.

In January 2025, Balland (Ledger co-founder) and his wife were kidnapped from their home in France. The kidnappers demanded approximately 100 BTC (valued at $100 million) and sent a video showing Balland’s injured finger to another Ledger co-founder, Eric Larcheveque. Despite executing on their demand, authorities were able to trace, freeze, and seize “almost all” of the cryptocurrency that was paid as part of the ransom negotiations:

1. The recovery involved blockchain analysis to track the movement of funds.

2. Cooperation with cryptocurrency exchanges was crucial to freeze the assets before they could be accessed by the kidnappers.

3. The rapid response by authorities (within 24–48 hours) was instrumental in recovering the funds before they could be moved through multiple wallets or mixing services.

This case demonstrates that while cryptocurrency transactions are pseudonymous, they are not anonymous, and authorities have increasingly sophisticated tools to track and recover illicit funds when working with exchanges and blockchain analytics companies.

Financial institutions that fall within local regulations are making it easier to interact with their systems

Visa and Mastercards make it possible for any cryptocurrency wallet to issue a virtual or physical credit card that acts as a debit card as long as the user has performed a KYC check. The first initiatives came from players like Crypto.com, Coinbase and more recently Metamask. The latter is the most interesting as compared to centralized exchanges, Metamask doesn’t hold users’ funds and a user is free to dispose and spend its holdings at any point of sale that supports Mastercards. 

Many other financial intermediaries are making it easier to on ramp users money onto their cryptocurrency wallets and are including support for Apple and Google Pay.

Users holding stable coins are now able to receive a yield and some banks will soon make it easy to open a bank account linked to a blockchain wallet, enabling anyone to open a US dollar account and receive payments in stable coins on their mobile wallet from any place in the world.

These rapid changes reflect well what happened at the time when Skype opened Skype-Out and Skype-In which enabled users to terminate calls to landlines, mobile phones and even receive calls directly on their computer or mobile on a local phone number of their choice. 
The intermediaries or local telcos providing the service were subject to local regulations but in the end Skype was the one capturing most of the value coming from the volumes of minutes or subscriptions generated by the service. While gathering users from around the world, Skype was not subject to any regulation, was operating its decentralized infrastructure and focusing on maintaining its scalability and quality of service. Each time there was a call placed outside of the Skype network, they were relying on local telcos and partners to deal with the regulation and provide the necessary compliance.

This is how the financial industry could be quickly disintermediated and disrupted

1. A user in a small African town, a South American city or a nomad worker can perform a KYC online and open a US bank account to receive payments in USD.

2. As the funds are received, this same user could have the funds automatically sent to their mobile wallet in the form of stable coins with their balance recorded on the blockchain.

3. They can now spend this money at any merchant using a virtual credit card issued by their mobile wallet application and they can store it on their Apple or Google Pay wallet.

4. In traditional finance, getting a loan typically requires one of two things: either significant collateral (often 100% or more of the loan value) or a good credit score. It allows for undercollateralized loans but requires sharing your entire financial history with credit institutions and lenders. Zero-knowledge proofs make it possible to privately store on-chain credit scoring and therefore enable undercollateralized lending.

5. In early DeFi (Decentralized Finance), loans were almost exclusively overcollateralized — you needed to deposit more value than you borrowed, which defeats the purpose of a loan for many users. This was necessary because there was no way to assess creditworthiness without revealing sensitive financial information. With zero-knowledge proofs, a new model has emerged:

   • A user can prove they have a history of repaying loans on time without revealing which loans or the specific details of their financial history.

   • They can prove their income exceeds a certain threshold without revealing exactly how much they earn or where it comes from.

   • They can prove they have maintained certain balance levels in their accounts without revealing the exact balances.

   • They can prove they haven’t defaulted on previous loans without revealing any details about those loans.

   All of this can be cryptographically verified on-chain without any of the underlying data being exposed. This allows for truly undercollateralized lending in a decentralized environment — something that was impossible before ZKPs.
   Protocols like Aave and Compound are exploring ZKP-based credit delegation systems that would allow for undercollateralized loans based on verifiable but private financial history.

   This represents a fundamental shift in how payments and credits can be extended globally and made accessible to people who have been excluded from traditional banking and lending markets. Just as Skype made international communications accessible to people who could hardly afford traditional international calling rates and spend hours on a call with their families.

The technical foundations of financial disruption are in place

Twenty one years ago, I stood in a London office signing an agreement that would help Skype connect to the traditional telephone network. That signature was more than a business deal — it was my unwitting participation in a revolution that would fundamentally transform global telecommunications. What began as a peer-to-peer application for your computer with a handful of users grew to capture 40% of international calls worldwide, dramatically reducing costs and democratizing global communication.

Today, as I witness blockchain technology and zero-knowledge proofs reshaping finance, I’m struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The patterns are unmistakable: the initial resistance from incumbents, the technical breakthroughs enabling scalability, the gradual integration with traditional systems, and the dramatic reduction in costs. We are standing at the same inflection point for finance that telecom faced in 2005 — the early adopters are here, the technology is maturing, and the regulatory environment is beginning to adapt.

I believe this disruption will be even more profound. While Skype revolutionized how we communicate, blockchain is revolutionizing how we store and exchange value — a fundamental aspect of human civilization that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. The ability to transfer value instantly across borders without intermediaries, to access sophisticated financial services without a traditional bank, and to prove creditworthiness without revealing personal data will unlock economic potential for billions of people currently excluded from the global financial system.

The incumbents who adapt will survive, just as some telecom companies eventually embraced VoIP technology. Those who resist will find themselves increasingly irrelevant, like the international calling card companies that have all but disappeared. 
The financial institutions currently experimenting with blockchain integration are the equivalent of the forward-thinking telecom operators who partnered with Skype in its early days.

What makes this moment particularly powerful is that we can see the future by looking at the past. The disruption of telecom provides a roadmap for what is coming in finance. If the pattern holds — and all evidence suggests it will — we can expect blockchain-based financial services to capture a significant portion of global transactions within the next decade, following a similar S-curve adoption pattern to what Skype experienced.

I have had the rare privilege of not just witnessing but participating in two of the most significant technological disruptions of our time. The lesson I have learned is that when decentralized technologies meet essential human needs — whether it is our need to communicate or our need to exchange value — the resulting transformation is not just inevitable, it is exponential.

The question is no longer whether blockchain will disrupt finance, but how quickly and how completely.

For individuals, this is a moment to embrace the new tools becoming available. For businesses, it is a time to adapt or risk obsolescence. And for society as a whole, it is an opportunity to create a more inclusive, efficient, and accessible financial system.

Twenty years from now, we will look back at this moment as the beginning of a financial renaissance — a time when the walls between people and their money began to crumble, just as Skype once tore down the barriers to global communication. I was fortunate enough to play a small role in the first revolution.

“Now, I invite you to join in witnessing — and perhaps like me participating in — the second revolution.”

*https://www.spglobal.com/_assets/documents/ratings/research/100495128.pdf
**https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publications/macroprudential-bulletin/html/ecb.mpbu202207_2~836f682ed7.en.html

Messaging platforms should benefit similar laws as the “fair use” in the context of copyright. For example, copyright law does not specify any use of copyrighted material without permission is considered copyright infringement. Any time you use copyrighted content without explicit permission from the right owner, the platform is not exposed, you expose yourself to a potential copyright lawsuit. For example, when you post a copyrighted content without permission from the right owner on YouTube, you are the one being exposed, potentially the one who will have to deal with the consequences. Youtube can decide to take it down immediately without suffering the burden of any litigation, and it remains their call to do so.

The reality is that messaging and social media applications wield considerable power and influence. It’s no surprise that apps like Skype and WhatsApp were acquired for billions of dollars. Communication networks are powerful tools that every government would like to control or access.

I know this first-hand. I founded FireChat, a peer-to-peer mesh messaging application I created ten years ago. FireChat served as an uncensored and unmonitored communication channel for protesters during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014, and the parliamentary elections in Venezuela the following year. We all remember the role Facebook and Messenger played during the Arab Spring; similarly, I recall when Telegram halted group chats of students protesting against the regime in Iran.

To gain control of over-the-top communications networks, governments use various techniques when they cannot gain control through acquisitions from cooperative organizations, court rulings or via backdoors. Telecom companies are regulated and responsible for the phone numbers they issue and must cooperate with authorities if fraud or abuse is committed using these valuable digital resources.

I ran telecom companies in the past and had to testify 13 years later for a request of identity for a phone number that had been used in a fraud in Switzerland.

The first thing governments will do if the owner or main administrator of an important platform is not cooperating is to explain directly or indirectly (through friendly news outlets or publications) how their tool is being used for illegal activity. Often, these intimidation tactics succeed. If they don’t, and time is pressing, arresting the person who controls the platform becomes an option. Another intimidation tactic is to launch a DDoS attack on the platform or to hack public groups in public chats, such as by trolling users.

FireChat had to withstand a 400-Gigabit DDoS attack back in 2014 during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, it was the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. I remember the data center in San Francisco having to blackout the IP of our servers to keep operating.

While illegal activity on messaging platforms is horrible, these platforms play a critical role in free speech and upholding human and political rights. Messaging platforms are neutral instruments that can be used in various ways depending on the intent of the user.

I used this analogy in the past to explain the sensitivity of messaging tools by comparing them to utensils like a fork and a knife. “You can eat your meal with a knife and a fork. You can also stick them in the eye of your neighbor…”

Below is a quick draft of a possible law to protect messaging platforms and ensure the preservation of freedom of speech and innovation globally. I used the help of ChatGPT to get a quick draft.

Global Fair Use and Privacy Law for Digital Messaging Platforms

Section 1: Definitions

• “Messaging Platforms”: Refers to any digital platform enabling private, public, or semi-public communication between users, including text, images, videos, audio, and other multimedia content.

• “Fair Use”: Refers to the limited use of copyrighted content without the need for permission from the copyright owner, primarily for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, education, and research, subject to the conditions outlined in this law.

• “Privacy”: Private communications should be excluded from complying with any form of law as long as their access is willingly limited to a defined set of people.

Section 2: Scope of Application

• This law applies globally to all digital messaging platforms, encompassing public, and semi-public communication. Private messages, in the context of maintaining privacy, should stay out of reach given the private nature of communications.

• All types of content exchanged on these platforms, including text, images, videos, audio, and other multimedia formats, are subject to the provisions of this law.

Section 3: User Responsibilities

• Users may utilize content shared within messaging platforms under fair use principles, provided the use is for commentary, criticism, news reporting, education, research, or other similar purposes.

• If an original content creator explicitly requests the removal of their content or objects to its use, users are required to cease further use and, where possible, delete the content from the messaging platform.

• Users are prohibited from using any content that harms under-aged individuals or infringes upon personal liberties under the guise of fair use. Such content is not protected under this law.

Section 4: Platform Responsibilities

• Messaging platforms must provide mechanisms for notifying users if right owners claim their content is not used under fair use, where technically feasible.

• Upon receiving a legitimate request from local authorities or content owners to remove content used under fair use, platforms must make best efforts to remove the content, taking into account technical limitations.

• Platforms are required to collaborate with content owners and local authorities in investigating and addressing misuse of content but are not liable for user actions unless there is a failure to act where technically possible on legitimate removal requests.

• Private communications in the context of enabling privacy, as defined above, are excluded from this law.

Section 5: Enforcement and Penalties

• Violations of this law, particularly concerning content that harms minors or infringes upon personal liberties, will be subject to penalties under local and international laws.

• Users found in violation of these provisions may face account suspension, fines, or legal action depending on the severity of the breach.

• Messaging platforms that fail to comply with the requirements to notify or remove content upon legitimate request, where and when technically feasible, may also face regulatory action, including fines and operational restrictions.

Section 6: International Coordination

• Given the global nature of digital messaging platforms, this law encourages international cooperation in enforcement and the development of shared standards for implementing fair use and maintain privacy across jurisdictions.

• Messaging platforms are encouraged to adopt global best practices in implementing fair use notifications, content removal, and user education.

Section 7: Exemptions and Limitations

• Content exempt from fair use includes any material that:

1. Harms or exploits under-aged individuals, children, or minors.

2. Violates personal liberties, including but not limited to privacy rights, freedom of expression, and protection from harassment.

3. Is used in a manner that conflicts with the original purpose of fair use and privacy as defined in this law.

This draft law establishes a framework that balances the need to protect intellectual property and privacy while enabling the fair use of content and encryption within the context of messaging platforms.

I reserve the right to bring future edits to this post as new ideas, research and collaboration with other parties may bring light on new options and bring improvements to this draft.

With Click “Deep Reals,” you can view authenticated photos and videos linked to political identities, giving voters the confidence to trust content from politicians online and on social media platforms.

Click, is a groundbreaking product that fights misinformation by making it simple to capture and publish authenticated content, powered by the Nodle network. 

We are taking that further via our partnership with Campaign Verify . Campaign Verify is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization that provides identity verification services for U.S. political campaigns, parties, and PACs. 

We are offering an innovative end-to-end solution that pairs verified political identities with trustworthy content from these verified politicians. This trusted content, or as we call it, “Deep Reals,” includes photos and videos accompanied by immutable digital proofs of authenticity. Deep Reals ensures that content can be confidently shared across all social media platforms plus messaging apps and consumed as trustworthy content.

This year, as over 50 countries hold elections and more than 2 billion people worldwide head to the polls, we anticipate a surge in political misinformation and disinformation stories. These issues were highlighted as significant public concerns during the recent U.S. presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, we have already seen deep fakes of Vice President Kamala Harris arise. 

In response, Campaign Verify and Click have moved quickly to join forces and bring more truthful content to the forefront this election season, ensuring voters have access to accurate information.

We have integrated Click and Campaign Verify’s complementary services to offer a novel approach to fact-checking political content. Click and Campaign Verify are leveraging a new authorization token integration that securely links a politician’s identity to a Click account (or wallet). This allows audiences to trust the content, or “Deep Reals,” posted by those politicians, ensuring that the identity and content are genuine and not impersonated, edited, or AI-generated. Campaign Verify authorization tokens act as credentials that prevent political campaigns from spreading disinformation and spoofing. They enhance campaigns’ ability to reach voters and supporters while helping to maintain trust in U.S. political discourse and elections. Once Campaign Verify approves a political identity verification request, the political entity can generate an authorization token, which can be used by partners and services like Click. Politicians then authenticate their photos and videos by signing them through Click’s digital trust network, ensuring the authenticity of their content for supporters and the general public.

We envision a future where misinformation is significantly reduced, especially during elections. By equipping voters with tools to verify the authenticity of digital content, we empower them to make informed decisions based on accurate and reliable information. This partnership establishes an unprecedented level of transparency and trust for political content on social media.

In a recent interview at BootstrapLabs, I talked about the importance of Click for consumers surrounding the upcoming elections. Some key Click features that make this partnership with Campaign Verify possible (and mentioned in that interview), include:

• Proof of Provenance: Each piece of content captured through Click is cryptographically signed and stored on-chain via zkSync, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain, ensuring its authenticity and source.

• Content Certification: Click supports the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) and is a member of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).

• Accessibility: Click is available on both iOS and Android plus at clickapp.com. Click enables anyone with a smartphone to join our network and contribute to a more truthful digital landscape.

The Click app is currently available for download on both iOS or Android, and all content captured with Click can be accessed via the app and on our website at Clickapp.com. A new “Elections 2024” content channel has been created where users can sign their election-related content.

Thanks for reading, and please vote this election season!

That’s very likely the calculation Elon Musk made when he acquired Twitter. Any good businessman can quickly realize that with hundreds of millions of active users, paying billions to buy a major social network (either monetizing or with a clear path to monetization) is not a bad deal, especially when Meta is now valued at over a trillion USD today.

New social apps, like Amo and Lapse, have been experimenting with aggressive viral growth loops. The reality is that people generally don’t like sharing their address book and messaging all their contacts, especially for a new app or network, until that network shows real value to them (yes, it’s a bit of a catch-22).

These “growth hacks,” forcing users to invite their contacts, work to build awareness and installs quickly but seldom work for long-term growth. Of course, the benefit of quick bursts of viral growth is you can easily understand what products and features users want most and build these features before the next burst of growth. The reality is that the initial wave of users will likely become disengaged and won’t promote the product via word of mouth to family and friends. Plus, most product teams can’t keep up with the needs of these initial waves of user growth. Too many users too fast equals not enough time to innovate.

Also, no one anticipated ChatGPT adoption arriving so fast through a simple web chat interface. The numbers speak for themselves: 100 million+ users in a matter of a couple of months. This demonstrates that a simple utility that provides real customer value has the potential to grow exponentially—and fast.

It is very likely that the next social network will have little to do with any of the platforms and apps we are using today.

Messaging solutions are on everyone’s phone, and interoperability is improving. iMessage won the hearts of all Apple users, but with RCS, all Android users will likely start to love their native Android messaging again. WhatsApp is ubiquitous and the go-to app for exchanging contacts while traveling, especially outside the US.

If it is so easy to exchange information with anyone from anywhere, it would be amazing if users could share their content while keeping ownership and enabling their friends and contacts to interact.

That’s the bet Nodle has taken with Click. Click is a new camera app that enables anyone to create authentic content and share it with anyone globally through any messaging app or social network platform using a short URL.

Short URLs linked to external content are so powerful that Instagram, TikTok, and others make them very difficult to use. They know that’s a way to drive traffic off their platform. Elon did the same when blocking links to Mastodon. Just look at tools like Linktree that had to engineer a mechanism with a complex UX to let users access the content they want outside of Instagram.

So why not let users access and interact with the content they want from anywhere? Independently from their social account?

YouTube succeeded at this, except users must embrace video ads—we all thought that model was a thing of the past! At least, that’s what people from my generation thought. None of us care much for traditional TV channels. The most popular TV channels are associated with a brand or theme you can trust for the quality of their content production. Think Nat Geo, History, or Disney—they all have their own apparel and retail shops, too.

The subscription model is what makes Spotify, Apple TV, HBO Max, Netflix and Disney+ so successful. It just works. The issue is that it still is not fully inclusive and seems to have reached its limits in compensating original content creators.

Platforms can’t keep capturing most of the value their users and content creators generate. The model of the future is certainly a model that can enable anyone to benefit from their interactions, their content, and their data. That’s the promise web3 is supposed to fulfill. Except today, you need to be an engineer to interact fluently with anything that involves some form of value or currency.

With Click, we are exploring a new territory where anyone can create, own, and share any media content anywhere.

You can install the Click app and join us in this early phase of our journey to rewrite the dynamics of social networks. You can also make a difference along the way.

Isn’t this what the internet was supposed to do in the first place?

Reposted from Medium: https://medium.com/nodle-io/the-next-social-network-already-exists-and-its-owned-by-no-one-b73c898a4b86

What are Deep Reals?

Deep Reals represents a paradigm shift in digital content creation and validation. Or, as Grace Carney describes it, “A deep real is an inversion of a deep fake. It’s not assuming everything is real and that we just need to demonstrate something’s fakeness. Rather it assumes everything is fake and that we need to sufficiently demonstrate something’s realness.”

Unlike deep fakes, which are manipulated to deceive, Deep Reals are rooted in verifiable authenticity. They leverage blockchain and advanced technologies to ensure the integrity of media content, making it impossible to tamper with without detection. In an era where misinformation can spread like wildfire, Deep Reals offer a beacon of trust.

The Click App: A Tool for Creating Deep Reals

The Click app, available at clickapp.com, is at the forefront of this movement. Designed for both casual users and professionals, Click enables the creation of Deep Reals with ease. The app integrates seamlessly with smartphones, allowing users to capture photos and videos that are automatically authenticated and secured.

Key Features of Click:

1. Automatic Authentication: Every photo or video captured through Click is immediately authenticated using blockchain technology. This ensures that the content is time-stamped and its origin is verified.

2. Provenance Tracking: Click tracks the entire lifecycle of a media file, providing a detailed history of where, when, and how it was created and shared. It supports the new industry standard for content provenance C2PA.

3. Tamper-Proof: The app's trusted environment employs sophisticated cryptographic techniques and technologies used by banking apps to make any unauthorized alterations detectable. Users can trust that their content remains as they intended. 

4. User-Friendly Interface: Despite its advanced capabilities, Click offers an intuitive interface, making the creation of Deep Reals accessible to anyone, regardless of technical expertise.

5. Easily shared: Any Deep Real can easily be shared online on websites, social media, or any messaging platform using short links. Click Deep Reals links are comparable to YouTube videos and links.

6. Digital witnesses: The Click app is built on top of the Nodle network, and any participating mobile node will soon become a digital witness, enhancing the proof that a Click user really shot a photo or a video in the location and time indicated by the deep real.

Why Do Deep Reals Matter?

The line between reality and fabrication is increasingly blurred in today's digital age. Deep fakes have shown us the dark side of artificial intelligence, where videos and images can be manipulated to spread falsehoods. Deep Reals, on the other hand, harness the power of technology for good. They provide a way to counteract misinformation, restore trust in digital content, and protect individuals and organizations from reputational damage.

Real-World Applications

The potential applications for Deep Reals are vast. Journalists can use Click to ensure the integrity of their reporting, knowing that their media cannot be tampered with. Legal professionals can potentially rely on authenticated content as evidence in court. Citizens can prove incidents and local moments in their cities and municipalities. Everyday users can preserve their personal memories with the assurance that they remain genuine and own the content they share on social platforms. The Click app’s ability to democratize the creation of Deep Reals makes it a powerful tool in the fight against disinformation. In addition, all Click Deep Reals provide ownership and a way to trace that ownership, enabling users and creators to receive tips and attribution for their creations and payments for using their content. 

As our digital world expands, the importance of authenticity and trust cannot be overstated. Deep Reals, enabled by the innovative Click app, offers a promising solution to the challenges posed by deep fakes and other forms of digital manipulation. By making the creation of verifiable media accessible to all, Click is not just redefining digital content—it’s helping to build a more trustworthy internet for everyone. 

Come join us on this mission.