Censorship-resistant messaging app Bitchat surges in Nepal amid protests

Downloads of Jack Dorsey’s peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat exploded as Nepal’s government blocked major social media platforms during mass anti-corruption protests. Bitchat installs jumped from a few thousand to nearly 50,000 over the previous week as Nepalese protestors have flocked to the app. - link

OUR TAKE: In under two months, Dorsey’s vibe-coded app went from a weekend project to a critical communications tool involved in toppling a government.

Gen-Z-fueled protests in Nepal heated up this past week and fears of an impending government social media crackdown drove users to seek out alternative solutions. Bitchat fit the bill: easy to download, cross-platform, and intuitive to use.

Bitchat turns your cell phone into a mesh network, meaning you don’t need cell towers or even the internet to communicate.

Your phone connects to another phone within range, which then connects to other phones, and so on. Bing bang boom – you have a user-generated messaging that is peer-to-peer instead of reliant on big telecommunications companies.

For much of the world, that communication chokepoint is a serious barrier for political dissidents. Protestors in Bangladesh, Cuba, and Pakistan have faced restricted or blacked out internet as their respective governments cracked down on dissent. 

Something like Bitchat could offer protestors and human rights advocates in such areas a resilient, censorship resistant method of communication.

Still, Bitchat is still in early development. It’s buggy and the mesh network is limited by the bluetooth range of each device.

Regardless of the issues, the best app is the one that has the strongest network effects. In Bitcoin circles we often forget that sometimes the perfect technical solution is less important than the one with the most adoption.

-CBS

Yotta delivers big tent for discussion on the future of digital infrastructure

Blockspace was on the ground in Las Vegas this week for Yotta’s second annual digital infrastructure conference. 3,000+ attendees converged on the Mojave’s gambling oasis to discuss AI, neoclouds, cooling solutions, and everything in between. - link

OUR TAKE: In a Mining Pod interview with Yotta Founder George Rockett (which we plan to release as a bonus episode in the coming weeks, stay tuned!), the data center media mogul said that he wanted Yotta to be a big tent where all the different data center industry camps could come to mingle.

In that, the team no doubt succeeded with the diversity of attendees from infrastructure, to energy, to compute, to networking, and many more.

Here are my two major takeaways from the conference:

Bitcoin miners had a strong presence: Yotta provided plenty of overlap for not just the bitcoin miners pivoting to AI, but also data center infrastructure companies that can double dip into bitcoin mining.

To start, IREN and Terawulf, both recent darlings of the miner-to-AI pipeline, were headline sponsors, and while they did not sponsor, Crusoe Energy had a presence there, as well.

Cooling and infrastructure providers who services both traditional data centers and bitcoin miners, like Intelliflex, also had a strong presence.

I spoke with many companies I had never heard of who had provided some combination of container, immersion/hydro cooling, or electrical services to bitcoin miners even though their bread and butter is currently HPC.

The larger data center industry is eating the bitcoin mining industry bit by bit, and it showed on the floor at Yotta.

In a highly modular industry, picks and shovels win the day: It seemed to me that every other booth I came across had something to do with cooling solutions.

What amazed me about these companies is that many of there contracts involve bespoke buildouts — no one data center is the same, and while some macro aspects of data center design are standardized, there’s a lot of fine tuning to fit client-specific needs on the micro.

So a lot of these infrastructure providers can’t mass produce hardware; they have to tailor it to each data center client. And they are awash with business right now — the unsexy, picks and shovels businesses that are making a killing in the digital gold rush.

Oh, and apparently a lot of the cooling solutions providers manufacture their goods in Wisconsin. Who knew?

-CMH

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Tether eyes victory in UK High Court over Swan mining dispute: Law360

Per reports from Law360, Tether claims former operating partner Swan Bitcoin has “conceded that its joint venture . . . has exclusive ownership of intellectual property assets and confidential information developed in 2023 and 2024” in a UK High Court hearing. - link

Ledger CTO warns users to halt onchain transactions amid massive NPM supply chain attack

One of the largest hardware wallet manufacturers, Ledger, was hit with a supply chain attack this week. Ledger Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet urged users on X to stop making transactions particularly with the company’s software wallet. "If you use a hardware wallet, pay attention to every transaction before signing and you're safe. If you don’t use a hardware wallet, refrain from making any on-chain transactions for now,” Guillemet said. — link

Lightspark to resolve silent payments and Spark address clash, says CEO David Marcus

David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark, said that the company will fix its Spark address format so that it does not clash with the existing privacy-focused silent payments address format (currently, both address types begin with “sp1”). Developers say that similar address formats are undesirable (and that silent payments first used sp1). - link

Hyperliquid removes insider influence ahead of stablecoin vote

Hyperliquid has stripped team-staked HYPE tokens from the voting weight in its USDH stablecoin selection process to reduce insider influence as the network picks its preferred stablecoin. Early polling shows Native Markets now leading the race against heavyweights like Paxos, with the final vote set for September 14. - link

Starknet reveals ultra-cheap proof of Bitcoin's entire 16-year history

Starknet recently published a proof demonstrating they can verify Bitcoin’s full 16-year blockchain history on their network at a cost of only about $13.50. Research on bitcoin proofs are reducing costs and time – an optimistic trend for second layer solutions and mobile users. - link