coincodex.com
Key takeaways:
- Tether, Bitfinex, and Hypercore have launched P2P application Keet as the first product on the Holepunch platform
- Keet is a decentralized and encrypted video calling app that allows users to establish direct P2P connections with other users for audio and video calls, text messaging, and file sharing
- Tether and Bitfinex could expand their initial $10 million investment in Holepunch with an additional $100 million
Keet is a fully-encrypted peer-to-peer video calling app powered by distributed databases
The Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, its sister company and the issuer of the Tether stablecoin, Tether Operations Limited, and peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure provider Hypercore have announced the launch of a video calling application Keet.
Keet, which is currently still in alpha, is the first application developed on Holepunch, a platform dedicated to building Web3 products. According to a press release, Keet uses distributed databases and other technologies focused on decentralization “to facilitate real-time audio/video calls, text chat and file sharing.” Here’s an excerpt from the official statement that explains the P2P operations in more detail:
“ . . . [U]sers can find and connect to each other to form a swarm, on real-world home and office networks. This technique is called Distributed Holepunching and allows users to locate and connect to each other using only cryptographic key pairs upon authorization.”
According to a report published by The Block, Bitfinex and Tether have already put $10 million toward the development of the platform and plan on investing up to $100 million more going forward.
Paolo Ardoino, Tether CTO and newly appointed CSO of Holepunch, told the crypto news outlet that while Holepunch shares many similarities with BitTorrent (a prominent P2P platform bought by TRON in 2018), it provides a broader framework for building applications, beyond simple P2P file sharing. Ardoino shared the news about the launch of Keet with the broader crypto community via Twitter and described Holepunch as “basically torrent for datastreams and modern world wide web content,” in the thread.
1/#keet is out. A pure P2P video chat. Unstoppable, encrypted, no token, email, phone number required. https://t.co/bMHsH2a8Si
— Paolo Ardoino ?? (@paoloardoino) July 25, 2022
Keet is the first app built on top of #holepunch framework ?️?
Holepunch is an SDK/Framework to build any kind of P2P unstoppable app. https://t.co/eb1volhWzM
The goal of the Holepunch ecosystem, and its first app Keet, is to alleviate the single point of attack concerns and give users the ability to utilize various internet services without centralized intermediaries and without giving up control over their private and metadata.
Per the official statement, users will be able to transact on the Holepunch platform using USDT stablecoins. Payments will reportedly be settled on the Lightning Network, which is the most popular Layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin.
Mathias Buus, Holepunch CEO and JavaScript programmer with extensive experience in P2P and Node.js systems, had the following to say about Holepunch:
“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.”
Buss added that he believes Keet and Holepunch will become “the most unstoppable communication application,” potentially reaching billions of people across the globe.
The Holepunch protocol is slated to become open source sometime in the fourth quarter of 2022, after the successful completion of the alpha testing phase.