Satellite IM founder: crypto messaging must beat WhatsApp first, ideology second

Ashton Addison: How would you explain Satellite to someone new to web3 who uses messaging apps every day?▶ 00:46

Matt Wisniewski: The way you take back ownership is to build a product that's better than the Web 2 alternatives. You don't use crypto as a scapegoat. You truly build a better product, and then it's icing on the cake that it's built on decentralized tech. We went back to the protocol level, put a bunch of tools together and built our own little SDK for building different platforms on top of it. We have a truly agnostic back end, so you can run it on Ethereum, Solana, Matic, whatever you want. It plugs directly into the UIs we've built, and you don't have to understand anything about crypto or blockchain to use them. You can chat in 4K, 8K, 16K, whatever your computer can handle, with lossless audio. We're also including creator tools, so you can record to FLAC, or record meetings to MP4 with separated audio tracks. The goal is to reach feature parity with Web 2 and then do it better. Having no KYC and no ownership of your data is super important to us, and the application currently and always will work even if we don't exist in the future.

Ashton: Your grandma doesn't need to understand blockchain to use WhatsApp. How do you make Satellite work the same way?▶ 02:59

Matt: We've practically got grandmas on contract to test the app. It comes up in most of our meetings: grandma isn't going to know what an ID key is, or what a seed phrase is. We need better ways to store and back these up and to give users options, like whether to save it to the camera roll automatically or tell them how to put it in a safe. We want the UI to be as crypto-free as possible while still leveraging the technology on the back end. Crypto is a wonderful place with many great projects, but there are also scams that have burned its name. I think it's important to win people back and show that crypto can be more than money-making schemes, quick flips and gambling. If the front end is completely agnostic to that, people can test the platform before forming any preconceived judgment. Then they may find out later and think, 'This is pretty cool. I didn't have to spend any money, and they didn't try to sell me an NFT.' That's how we win them over.

Ashton: What are the main problems with Web 2 messengers that Satellite solves? Is it censorship, or the way they take your data for advertisers?▶ 05:28

Matt: Personally, privacy and security matter most to me, but I don't think that's the consensus for the general public yet. I think people will wake up. Still, someone like grandma doesn't really care about privacy. She cares about things being easy to use and not frustrating. So we've also built Satellite to be extensible and hyper-modular from the ground up, something anyone can customize. On Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord, if you want extra functionality you build a bot. We scrapped that and made extensions able to modify the entire functionality of the application. If you use Travis CI for your dev builds, you should be able to have a channel where those builds go and you can view them and click around. If you want a Spotify extension, you can listen together in a group chat and adjust the volume for everybody. It isn't a slash command, it's literally a play button. We looked at games like Minecraft and Skyrim, which I think lasted so long because of mods and plugins. We'll build a solid foundation, and people come and build the house on top however they want. We wanted the future of the platform to be decided by the community, not by us. Creators can also have their community suggest certain extensions when people join, and users choose whether to install them.

Ashton: What core features will Satellite have, and where are the limits?▶ 11:36

Matt: Direct messages, group messages, direct video and group video. We want to leave groups uncapped. You could have a million people in one if you wanted, though you should probably make a community. We're also going hard on file storage, since a lot of the architecture is based on IPFS. Discord has per-file limits: eight megabytes, or I think they recently touted 100 megabytes on a higher tier. Instead, we give free users a four-gigabyte storage bucket, and you can upload a four-gigabyte file to it if you want. Most of the time people only need a file for the moment, so you can choose a rolling delete schedule. When storage is full, it asks whether you want to unpin and delete a file so you can keep rolling. If you want to upgrade to a two-terabyte tier, that's on the table. The first, responsible goal is to reach parity with Web 2 and make sure everything is bug-free. Then we talk about nice-to-haves. We also have Uplink, a smaller, more minimal app akin to Telegram or WhatsApp, while our core application is more like Discord. If you want to bring something from the blockchain space to the masses, it has to be better than Web 2. The average person isn't going to switch because it's more private or because it's built on top of blockchain. They'll switch because it's better, it's cheaper and the video quality is higher. It just so happens that it's built on blockchain, and adding NFT-gated access to a community is maybe five minutes' work.

Ashton: Will Satellite include fiat payments, and does that compromise a blockchain-based app?▶ 16:49

Matt: I don't think it does. We're going to strive to include fiat payments. It's options, options, options. As a community we've dug ourselves into a hole with the banking institutions, and supporting them means jumping over regulatory hurdles, so I'd be lying if I said we have it all figured out. Finding the right partner is what matters most. There will be areas where Web 2 is just better or the only option right now. Unless bank accounts start allowing a wallet address, it will require some centralized intervention, like an API key Satellite uses to access a payment portal. We'll include those caveats as toggles, like when you set up a Mac and it asks whether to use location services. Do you want Satellite to facilitate payments? Do you want it to include sync nodes to increase performance? Anything that remains Web 2 should be switchable off with a click. We do have one caveat, and I'm not ashamed of it: we scan files for anything that carries our brand name. We scan them as they're encrypted, without decrypting them, through a company called Safer, which checks for CSAM. We're dead set on not allowing that on the platform. We compare the encrypted hash against public databases of known bad files, so nobody has to look at the files. If you don't agree, fork our code and remove it. But if we put our name on it, we'll have some minimal protections for our users.

Ashton: Where is Satellite right now, and what are the next steps?▶ 21:45

Matt: We're in the pre-release stage, which includes the web version of the application. I can't personally guarantee the timeline, but we're hoping by the end of this week to have native applications people can test: the Uplink versions for Android, and the desktop version for Mac, Windows and Linux. We're focused on a run-anywhere architecture, all built on Rust, a systems-level language, so you could even put Satellite on something like an Arduino-powered badge. We're entirely open source, under Creative Commons non-commercial. People can try it at any time, and if you want to help, submit a pull request. For those who are less tech-savvy, we'll release downloads of the native application weekly. We're at a really exciting time, finally getting to show the world what we've been building over the past year.