Session and the Fight for Real Private Messaging

Recorded at EthCC, Cannes.

Hodl Up: Hello guys and welcome back to another episode. Right now we have Chris from Session with us. Chris, thank you for joining us today, man.

Chris: Thanks for having me, guys.

Hodl Up: Of course. Good view, good place. We love Cannes, don't we?

Chris: Yeah, it's nice. It's pretty good.

Hodl Up: All right. To kick things off, I want to know about your life before crypto and how you got into crypto. The cliche TL;DR of the origin story. Why did you get into this industry in the first place?

Chris: Good question. I learned about Bitcoin around 2011 or 2012. Someone in my family told me about it, and I laughed. I thought, "This sounds ridiculous. Fiat is fine." But then a month later, I don't know what happened, but I'm the sort of person who goes down rabbit holes very intensely, and something shifted. I thought, okay, I'm going to take another look at Bitcoin. I remember spending the entire weekend in my room on the internet, learning everything about Bitcoin. I think it was a public holiday, so I had days off, and I just studied Bitcoin. Then I thought, okay, who made this? I need to find out who did this. I spent weeks trying to work out who I thought was behind it, and then I put it down, feeling like I knew who made it, even though it's very difficult to find out, especially now. So I went down that rabbit hole, and then I got some Bitcoin. I used Mt. Gox back in the day and had that experience. That was my first entry into the space. Then you talk to people about Bitcoin for a few days, and everyone's like, "What the hell are you talking about?" It was really high effort back then. So I forgot about it for a few years and went on with my life. I didn't get into crypto straight away.

Then, when I wrapped up a full-time job, I wanted to do something completely different. My wife said, "Take a year off, study, have fun, follow your passion." I was always a super nerd, and I liked crypto, so I thought, this is it. In 2017 I'm going to get into crypto and teach people about it. I'm going to make a website like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. That was my goal, because everyone was lying, everyone was just talking nonsense. I was sick of seeing people get tricked, and I wanted to help people. So I started building that. I started running crypto meetups in Melbourne, Australia, and met some awesome guys. We came together around the idea: what can we actually do with decentralized tech? We really liked Monero. I was giving Monero talks to crowds of a few hundred people with these guys, and we built a bond. We thought, let's create a Monero fork with a masternode network on top, and then build cool technology on top of that. Someone thought it was a great idea and said, "Here's $300,000, make it happen." We said, all right, let's do this. We did an ICO in 2018. It was called Loki back in the day, LOKI. We raised $9.2 million in about two weeks. Everything just lined up perfectly. We've been building ever since. We now have the product. We've changed names, and things have changed over time. We moved away from the Monero fork, and it now operates on Arbitrum as a DePIN node network with applications running on top. The app is called Session, and it has 1.7 million monthly active users now. So we've hit product-market fit for a Web3 product, which is cool. It gets hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. We've come so far and we have an awesome team. But right now we're at a super critical juncture, and we can get into that later.

Hodl Up: What I'm going to ask might sound a bit strange. A lot of the founders and companies we learn about, while interviewing them for example, started a crypto business just for the sake of starting a crypto business, because they could do things in a decentralized way. Was there a situation that led you to say, "Okay, we need an app like Session, and people need to use something like this"? Where did the idea to fulfill this need to message privately come from?

Chris: That first principle, whether a technology actually gains any value from running on a decentralized network, was our first question. We asked, why would we do this or that? And the answer was often no, these are pointless, better not done in Web3. Secure communication was quite an obvious one to us at the time, in 2018: you can actually leverage decentralization to build a trustless network and communicate through it. For us it was a bit of a no-brainer. We were relatively smart people who loved crypto and understood very early what you could do with the technology. Everyone around us was saying, "I'm going to put property on the blockchain, I'm going to put my goldfish on the blockchain," or a memecoin, and it's like, you don't have to blockchainize everything. The core question we asked ourselves, and that everyone building in crypto should ask, is: what can you actually do with a trustless network?

Hodl Up: That's true. Is it better centralized or decentralized? Now I'm curious how the whole regulatory side works, and feel free to forward this to the legal team.

Chris: Like a lawyer.

Hodl Up: The reason I'm asking is that I remember, a year ago, when Pavel landed in France and they got him.

Chris: And here I am, walking free. How is this possible?

Hodl Up: How is this possible? How does regulation work when you have a private messaging app?

Chris: In that exact case, there's a really specific difference between Session and Telegram. Telegram and Durov have access to all your messages. I don't think they're actually encrypted. To have a private, encrypted chat, you have to opt in: go into the settings and start a secret chat with somebody, and that will be encrypted. So everything you say in one-to-one chats, communities and so on is accessible to the Telegram team. So if he lands in France, the French government, or any government that wants that information, just grabs him, physically puts him in a box, and says, "You don't leave the box until you change your terms of service and start giving us the data we ask for." Next minute he's out of containment, they've changed their terms of service, and now they hand over the information that's requested. And now Telegram suddenly seems to be getting banned in Russia at the same time, which is an interesting coincidence if you want to look into it at some point.

Hodl Up: I'm sure it's 100% just a coincidence.

Chris: Just a coincidence. Don't look into it too much.

Hodl Up: You mentioned you have 1.7 million active users on Session. That's amazing, to be honest, because I'm going to call it a consumer app, since that's what it is at the end of the day.

Chris: Keep it simple.

Hodl Up: What challenges are you facing at Session right now? He mentioned regulatory challenges, but you don't have access to the chats, so there's nothing you can do about that.

Chris: Right. If regulators come to us and say, "Give us this person's data," we don't even know if that person uses Session. We don't hold that data. It only sits on the network for two weeks, and we never had access to it. So it's a completely different situation. In terms of regulatory pressure...

Hodl Up: No, I'm asking about challenges on the business side: scaling and growing in this industry. I think consumer apps focused specifically on Web3 are harder to scale, and you've already found your PMF. So how are you doing it?

Chris: A lot of time, dude. We've been building for eight years, so it's been a long journey. I'd just say Session has been built with a lot of honesty, integrity and love. It's the application we think is best to build. Over time, people have said it's a silly idea: "You don't need this level of privacy. Why don't you trust big tech and government?" But we don't, and that's okay. That's our choice. I think a lot of people in crypto, the ones who are here for the right reasons and understand the logic of corruption, control and power, see that you shouldn't have a centralized organization controlling everything and choosing who you can and can't speak to or send money to. We have a very dedicated team that says, "Forget your ideas, this is what we think is right, and this is what we're doing." It's been a really hard journey. We've been through multiple bear markets and survived, thankfully. But we're in a super tough position right now, financially. We put out a call for help, for donations, because we're pretty much out of runway. And we're one of the most used Web3 products. We don't pay anyone to use it; we get so much organic traction. By building what we thought was right, in the right way, and building honestly, we've had support and positive feedback from Proton Mail, who put out articles about us, and from WikiLeaks, who put out some positive things about us. We've had Rob Braxman and so many privacy OGs who look at what we've actually done and help us organically. We don't pay any of these people. We've just done it organically, as best we can, in the way we thought was right.

Hodl Up: Talk to us about the future of Session, since you just said you're in a really tough position right now.

Chris: Absolutely. We're on a knife edge. If we don't get more funding in the next one to two weeks, urgently, we'll be scaling back, and I don't know what the future will look like. We are absolutely on a knife edge. I may seem cool, calm and collected, and all I can do is my best to make sure we survive and keep delivering really cool tech to people. I've been walking around going to events, and people have come up to me asking, "Do you need help? What's going on?" They don't want Session to die. There are a lot of big Session users here, which has been nice. We had Vitalik give us support at the end of last year, but unfortunately the VC market is just gone: the war, inflation, all the shenanigans going on right now, at a time when the world is going crazy against privacy and Session is growing really well. It's a high-demand product; everyone needs privacy right now. But the finance side has just dried up, and we're in a really tough spot. Our only option right now seems to be donations to keep the Session Foundation operating and keep building the tech. Hopefully we get a lot of donations, people see the importance of Session, and we can keep building and scaling, and hopefully within 12 months it can become a self-sustaining app. But right now it's a knife edge. I don't know what the future holds, and I'm just doing my best.

Hodl Up: Let's be super optimistic right now. I do believe you'll survive and actually thrive, because, as you said, the demand for what you're building is there, and people want to use it and are using it. So let's say you survive, scale and grow. What does Session look like in two or three years?

Chris: That's a lot of years, but in terms of the next 12 months, and I love your optimism, I'm there too: we want to bring in perfect forward secrecy and post-quantum encryption, which are really essential at the moment, plus a few other features that make the application snappier, easier and faster. Overall improvements. But the drive now is self-sustainability: Session Pro, with premium features like stickers and badges, the kind of thing that will let the project operate without constantly asking for funding. We want to be number one among private messaging apps and knock out everybody else, and PFS and post-quantum encryption can let us do that. What are the other key items? We have an onion routing protocol that used to be called Lokinet and is now Session Router, and it's a humongous improvement. But with a technology that has millions of users, it's really hard to change the wheels and the infrastructure underneath at the same time. So we have this really awesome improvement to the network infrastructure layer that we want to bring in as well. We have groups, and a bunch of smaller quality-of-life features people ask for. And wallets as well, sorry, just to throw that in. I want to bring wallets. We're talking to the Kohaku people and some other wallet providers. We want to bring wallets soon, because that would enable things like multiple accounts that can help the project be sustainable. Unfortunately, I think those implementations are probably six to nine months away at the fastest. So maybe desktop wallets first, and mobile wallets after that.

Hodl Up: I'm also optimistic, but it helps to play devil's advocate, or be more realistic, on some aspects. I think for you to survive, you need to onboard, say, the next 1.7 million users. Most crypto users use centralized exchanges, for example, and aren't very concerned about privacy. It's about finding ways to educate people, the next billion users, so they don't form the misconception that people who need private messaging apps are criminals. We've seen it with privacy coins too: if you meet someone who uses privacy coins, your first thought is, okay, he's a drug dealer or something. Allegedly. So how do we convince people these apps aren't for criminals, that they're for people's own good? How do we make sure they fully understand the importance of privacy, especially in this space and in a world that's becoming more dystopian by the day?

Chris: It's a tough one, because there's a lot of propaganda against privacy, so you're up against a lot. Unfortunately, the lowest-cost, easiest way to cut through and educate people on privacy seems to be them losing their privacy and human rights. In countries like Australia, certain phrases have been designated so that if you say them, it's a minimum one-year jail sentence. Words will put you in jail. It's outrageous. These outrageous, anti-freedom crackdowns are coming out in the UK, in Australia, in America, in Europe. You guys have Chat Control, which they keep trying to bring back, and people say, "No, this is a terrible idea, letting the government read all your messages." So it's a constant fight. And the easy route is that you're going to feel some pain. You're going to lose some freedoms, and as you lose them, you'll come screaming for privacy. I don't have the energy to convince you. I can see the future, but you don't believe me, and that's okay. When it hits, you'll come calling, and we'll have something for you. We're going to give you a big hug. Session is waiting. We're just going to keep doing it, and we're waiting for you.

Hodl Up: You said we're going to lose some of our freedoms and privacy, but I think we've already lost quite a lot of freedom and privacy at this point, and in the next 6 to 12 months we'll lose more, until we have none left. You both made good points about educating people, which is necessary, but you can't educate someone who has been conditioned not to care about privacy. What's happening in Europe with Chat Control, as you said, is crazy. I don't understand how people don't even care about that. I don't want to put any more pressure on you...

Chris: Lay it on me, dude. Lay the pressure on me. I can take it.

Hodl Up: People like you have a responsibility to push harder and tell us why Session must continue to exist, grow and scale. Why should we believe, and, as you said, why should donors and investors, not just us but everyone, try to help you and give it our all? Do you get my point? Because I made a long statement.

Chris: No, it's all good. I think about this sometimes. Building Session is hard. Building technology that people don't appreciate right now is a very personally challenging thing to do. Sometimes I think, should I give up? Should I quit? Am I the right person for this? And then I think, no, I really want Session to stay alive. I think it's the only application I can trust, because I know it's not taking my data. I don't have to trust anyone when I use Session. When I had that thought, I knew I absolutely can't give up on this project. It has to stay alive for everybody. It has to. Everyone has their own value proposition, the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. For me, I want to be able to talk. I want to be free. I don't want to be contained or controlled. I want to speak my mind. I want to be a human being and enjoy life. It's hard to ask people to take proactive steps right now to protect these things, because we're all frogs in a pot and the temperature is going up little by little. So it's really hard to make people conscious of it. All I can say is we're doing our best. I've asked myself whether building Session is the right thing to do, and I know it is. So all I can do is my best: tell people why privacy is so important and hope they understand and feel it, because it's different for everybody. When people come to me and say, "Oh, I've got nothing to hide," I say you absolutely do. You wear clothes for a reason. You don't stay in a hotel with the door open for a reason. You don't post naked photos of yourself online. You do these things for a reason: you do want privacy. You don't want people knowing how much money is in your bank account, all this metadata. You don't want to share this with people. And for some reason there's this propaganda sentence people always come back with: "I've got nothing to hide." And if you say, "Well, actually I do have something to hide," then you're a bad guy. It's a ridiculous concept, because everybody has something they want to keep to themselves. The things that make you who you are, the things you don't want to tell other people, the things you hold close: that is you. That's your soul, your spirit, your consciousness. You shouldn't have to give away everything. It's hard to explain these things unless you've seen someone who's lost it, and you see the pain and the hurt, and this person has nothing left. They're not a person anymore. I just want everyone to be their best self, to communicate freely and be free. There's such beauty in that. You see countries with no freedom, where you can't say certain things or do certain things, otherwise the thought police come and grab you.

Hodl Up: Exactly, the thought police.

Chris: It's not the world I want to be part of, and I know I just have to push against that world.

Hodl Up: Chris, thank you very much for joining us today. This whole discussion has opened my eyes even more, because I'm a pro-privacy guy. I wasn't back in the day, but in the past year, since we started the podcast, we've hosted some people, and now...

Chris: Now you have things to hide. What's in your pockets?

Hodl Up: And now you're the cherry on top, for real. It's such an important matter that people tend to forget about, but the authorities never forget. They keep pushing with the surveillance and everything. So thank you for joining us once again. We wish you good luck with everything: keeping Session alive, and keep building, growing and scaling.

Chris: We'll stay alive, I know it. But we need help.

Hodl Up: Of course.

Chris: Help us, please. We want to help you with your privacy. Please help the project.

Hodl Up: Yes. Anyone who respects the ethos of crypto even a tiny bit, please check them out and do whatever you can to help these guys build and scale. Thank you very much.

Chris: Thank you, sir.

Hodl Up: All right, thank you again, and have a good day.

Chris: Thanks.