DChat in plain language

The problem with every messenger you already use

Three questions decide what a messenger really is, and almost everything else follows from them.

What is your account? For WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, it is a phone number. That is convenient, and it means your account is only as private as the company that issued the number and the database that stores it.

Who runs the servers? For almost every messenger, one company does. They may be honest, competent and well intentioned. They are still a single place to breach, to subpoena, and to switch off.

What happens to money? Nothing. Payments are a different app, a different account, and a different set of people who know what you spent.

DChat answers all three differently.

Your account is a key, not a number

When you open DChat for the first time, your phone generates a key pair and shows you 24 words. Those words are your account. There is no email address, no phone number, no password, and no account on a server anywhere that could be leaked, reset or handed over.

You also choose a username during setup, and it is required: the app will not move past the Create Account screen until the name you pick is available. That username lives on a public ledger, which is how it can be globally unique without any company deciding who owns it. It is also the trade you are making, so it is worth saying clearly: because the ledger is public, anyone can look up your username, find the wallet address behind it, and read that wallet's entire transaction history. Pick a name you are comfortable being public, and do not treat the attached wallet as private.

The trade for all of this is real and the app tells you plainly: if you lose the 24 words and every device you were signed in on, nobody can bring the account back. Not support, not us. There is no back door, which is the point, and it is also the risk.

How a message actually travels

When you send a message, your phone encrypts it before it goes anywhere, using a key that only you and the person you are talking to can compute. What leaves your phone is unreadable to everyone in between.

It goes to a service node: a server run by an independent operator who has put up a stake to run it. If the recipient is online, it arrives immediately. If they are not, the node holds the encrypted blob and passes it around the network so that whichever node they connect to has it waiting. Nobody along that path holds a key. Undelivered messages are deleted after 14 days.

One tick means the network took it. Two ticks mean their device confirmed it. The read receipt is itself an encrypted message travelling back to you.

There is one detail worth knowing. Encryption keys do not last forever: they change automatically after 10,000 messages or 30 days. If a key were ever stolen, the damage is limited to that window instead of your entire history. Several comparable apps do not rotate keys at all.

Groups

Every member of a group holds their own encryption key for that group, and each member's key is delivered to the others through the same private one-to-one channel used for direct messages. No server ever sees a group key or could construct one, so a group conversation is end-to-end encrypted in the full sense.

Groups hold up to 100 people, with two roles, members and admins. Invite links create join requests an admin approves. New members cannot read anything sent before they arrived, because they do not hold the older keys. When someone leaves or is removed, the remaining members' keys are replaced, so the person who left cannot read anything that follows.

Group membership is not written to the ledger. That is deliberate: a public membership list would be a permanent public record of who is in which group.

Calls

A one-to-one voice or video call connects your device directly to theirs and is end-to-end encrypted. As with any direct call in any app, that means the person you call and the connection helper can see your IP address.

Group calls, up to 25 people, work differently. They pass through a media server that routes video between participants, which is what makes a many-person call possible on a phone at all. That server decrypts and re-encrypts the video, so a group call is encrypted in transit rather than end to end. Group messages are unaffected. If you need a live conversation that nobody in the middle could access, use a one-to-one call.

Who runs the network

Service nodes are run by independent operators, not by us. To run one you stake 10,000,000 DCHAT, which is money you lose a slice of if your node goes offline. Nodes check each other rather than reporting their own uptime: a randomly selected group of ten nodes probes a node, and seven of them have to agree it was up. The operator does not choose who checks them and cannot know in advance.

Because storage is spread across every node, no single one is important. If one disappears, your messages are on the others, and your app simply connects somewhere else.

Money inside the conversation

The wallet comes from the same 24 words as your account, so there is nothing extra to back up and nobody holding your funds. You can send DCHAT inside a chat the way you send a photo, request a payment, and stake to help secure the network and earn from it.

Messaging is free. Fees apply only when something touches the ledger, which means payments, staking and username registration.

What DChat does not do

Every private messenger has limits, and a messenger that will not tell you its own is not worth trusting. Here are DChat's.

Encryption keys rotate on a schedule rather than changing with every single message the way Signal's do. If a key were stolen, the exposure is a window rather than one message.

The network can see communication patterns. Relays cannot read anything you write, but they can see that an account is sending messages and roughly when. DChat is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and there is no onion-routing layer today. A VPN or Tor works normally with DChat if you need that.

Group calls are not end-to-end encrypted, for the reason above. Group messages are.

DChat has not been through an independent security audit. The full specification is published so anyone can check the design, but no external firm has reviewed it yet. Commissioning one is the first item on the roadmap.

Where to go next

The whitepaper covers all of this at full technical depth, including the exact algorithms and every parameter. The cryptographic specification goes further, to the level someone would need to reimplement the protocol or attack it. The security page gives the threat model and how to report a flaw. The FAQ has short answers to 80 specific questions.