OffCode

Quoting their docs: Kryfo: "you are a key pair generated on your device. nobody, including us, can look you up or tie your chats to a real identity." - so there is identity, it's a key. Night Drop: "Your identity is a keypair held on your device." Bitchat - user identity is the hash of public key. Briar - it has Briar ID, which is also a cryptographic identity of the user. So all these and other apps have pseudonymous user identities, not "no user identity". The problem with pseudonymous identities is that they can be de-anonymised with LLMs by comparing observable [parts of] connection graphs with public connection graphs (X, Facebook, etc.). There is a relevant research from 2009 about deanonymizing social networks where users are pseudonymous: arxiv.org/abs/0903.3276 It was quite successful then, and it's much easier now, as participation in social networks in much wider, and LLMs are cheap. The difference of SimpleX Network from all pseudonymous (aka anonymous) messengers and networks, is that it has no concept of user identity at all - there is nothing that identifies a user to the network - not a key, hash, or some random number. There are addresses and there will be public names soon, but they exist as opt-in layer for those who want to be discovered, and in any case they are not used to deliver messages - they are only optional rendezvous points. Instead, SimpleX Network uses pairwise connection identifiers with anonymous per-connection credentials. So network servers can observe which connections exist, but not which (or even how many) users exist. Our knowledge of active users is from App Store and Play Store data, and from download statistics of the app. And even on the transport level - network servers can observe user IP addresses (same as Tor entry nodes can), but not which IP address talks to which IP address. You can look at a simplified vizualization of how SimpleX works here: simplex.chat/messaging/#simp… (in reality there are two independent servers in message delivery path) So if you talk to 2 people in SimpleX, they have no simple way to prove you are actually the same user, because there is no correlation between your connections on metadata level, other than by time or writing style. So "the only messaging network without any user identifiers" is not just marketing, it's a fact.

SimpleX Chat has grown to over 600,000+ users! More than 70% in the last 6 months and 20x since the 2023 investment round. SimpleX is the only messaging network without user identifiers - which means that nobody can reach you unless you want it, and nobody can watch or block your private conversations. It is the only network that can protect users from AI scammers that can fake people you trust, even their email addresses and phone numbers. You can now invest in SimpleX Chat and own a part of it - watch our new explainer video on Wefunder. wefunder.com/simplex.chat