Jack Dorsey has opened public testing for Bitchat, a new peer-to-peer messaging app that works without the internet. The beta, rolled out on Sunday, uses Bluetooth Low Energy to pass encrypted texts from one device to another, forming a pop-up mesh network.
Dorsey also published the whitepaper outlining design goals for resilience and privacy of the application. He called the project a throwback to Internet Relay Chat yet built for an age of censorship shutdowns and mobile crowds, where quick, private chat can matter most.
The whitepaper explains that Bitchat has no servers, log-ins or phone numbers. Each handset plays client and relay, passing 500-byte fragments across a thirty-meter hop. Messages stay only in memory unless the user toggles store-and-forward, and every payload is sealed with end-to-end encryption drawn from the Signal protocol family.
Code posted to GitHub shows the system leaning on open-source Bluetooth mesh libraries and hashing room names with optional passwords. Early testers join through Apple TestFlight, but the plan is to move to full open installs once battery impact and relay stability are tuned during the beta run. The team hopes eyes will audit cryptography and help trim battery drain on phones.
Developers note that mesh links can chain across halls, protests or disaster zones, letting chat jump handset to handset when cell towers fail. The model echoes walkie-talkie resilience yet keeps modern comforts such as group channels, direct messages and emoji. Dorsey argues the design removes big-tech gatekeepers and data harvesters.
Next on the roadmap is Wi-Fi transport to lift bandwidth for pictures and longer posts. For Dorsey, who cofounded Twitter and later backed the Bluesky protocol, Bitchat is another push toward self-owned communication. If testers hold the mesh, the app may prove that private talk can survive even total network blackouts.
