Keet is untethering social media from Big Tech

Every text sent to a pal or your favorite chat group is a canon event. Contributing to an ongoing conversation, sharing an important update, or just checking up on your significant other, social messaging is unhinged…by design. And whether it is part of a growing introvert culture or simply an effect of the welcoming UX of contemporary social messaging applications, the preference for chatting over other forms of communication has been on the rise in the past decade. 

Yet, we are forced into demureness every time we chat – conservative communications triggered by the fear of an eavesdropper who is not necessarily someone with direct access to our devices. Ironically, more chat apps claim to be end-to-end encrypted, but the ads you’re shown daily are surprisingly related to the “closed room” conversations you previously had. This questions every theory of privacy in social communication. 

The culprit is conscious data centralization. Social communication applications are inescapably reliant on centralized data servers, upstreaming every piece of information sent via chats to managed data centers.

Every time you send a text or multimedia to a pal via chat, your files are stored on a cloud server, where the receiver downloads them. Developers package the intercommunication between devices and managed servers into intuitive interfaces we call messaging applications. And this shouldn’t be a problem since most of our communication is “harmless”. However, perspectives are changing: what we share in chats should be personal, but data centers are overusing this data for surveillance and capitalist purposes without due permission.

This heralds a dystopian future for social messaging.

According to Mathias Buus, Co-founder of Holepunch, a P2P data management protocol;

“Today’s reality looks markedly different, with each passing year bringing greater privacy consciousness.”

Buus is a known open-source advocate and joined forces with Tether to develop Keet, a privacy-focused peer-to-peer social messaging application that defies the current controlled state of social communication.

Launched in 2022, the Keet chat app has been downloaded millions of times across mobile and desktop application stores. Mobile app directory – Appbrains reports a 150%+ spike in Keet app downloads in Q1 2026, as demand for private messaging applications grows. 

Keet is a purely peer-based social communication platform built with Pears, a runtime and development kit for building P2P applications that do not require managed operational infrastructures. No servers, no data upstream to data centers, even when you transfer multimedia to your peer.  

With Keet, users provide the infrastructure. Tether’s P2P breakthroughs power networks that scale as more people join. This way, information shared via Keet moves efficiently and privately from the sender to the receiver(s) without traversing proprietary infrastructure, such as centralized servers. 

Thanks to Keet’s underlying technology, this messaging app is the first communication layer in the history of humanity, designed to scale to tens of billions of humans, robots, and trillions of AI agents without requiring a single datacenter. No other platform could compete, neither in terms of scalability, resilience, or zero infrastructure costs.

Keet’s privacy is hardcoded by the underlying Hypercore architecture. Hypercore is a suite of modules for P2P data management built on Hole Punching – a technique that enables heterogeneous devices to create a secure, truly private communication portal. HyperCore modules include:

• Hypercore: An append-only data logging algorithm that creates and stores a record of your texts on your device. 
• Hyperswarm: Hyperswarm is the discovery engine of the HyperCore protocol. It uses HyperDHT, a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), to help your device find your friends and connect with users with similar interests via discovery keys. 
• Hyperbee: Hyperbee is the state engine. It manages the application’s state (such as sorting contact lists and maintaining user settings) like a decentralized database.
• Hyperdrive: A torrent-based file sharing protocol on Hypercore. With Hyperdrive, Keet turns your computer into a mini file server. Instead of uploading your multimedia to the cloud, your files remain on your device, and the recipient downloads them directly from your hard drive.

When you send a text or a multimedia to a friend via Keet, the Hypercore protocol logs your text on your device, enabling the receiver to access it using Hyperswarm, while Hyperbee manages your application operations, updating settings, and keeping a correct order of events, akin to Redux in regular React native applications. File transfers are handled by Hyperdrive, which supports files of any size (including those over 100 GB). 

In a joint interview, Buus and Tether CEO, Paolo Ardoino, stated, “Keet’s goal is to become the most unstoppable communication application, offering a great user experience, with maximum privacy and security.” 

The development team has so far pursued this goal by shipping updates and improving the user experience on the Keet App. On the Keet App, you can now make private voice and video calls to your pal, team members at work, or your fun group. In addition to secure video and text communication, the Keet team also shared plans to integrate a crypto wallet for sending and receiving USDT payments and a Lightning integration for instant Bitcoin payments.

Keet supports undiluted social communication, removing the need for conservativeness and the fear of being tapped through your communication channels. It serves executives who plan special operations and share classified files. But more relevant is the absolute freedom it offers to everyday communication. 

Want to share important information without giving it up to the big techs first? Messaging applications like Keet are happy to help!

Keet’s privacy and local resource utilization are part of Tether and Holepunch’s approach to building secure and high-performance applications. The Pear Runtime that powers Keet is also used in a range of products, including Pear Pass – a private password manager and QVAC Health, an AI-powered health assistant that provides wellbeing insights based on user data. Designed for personal use and to handle sensitive information, the architecture underlying these applications enforces privacy as the only way to build trust between users and everyday utility applications. 

According to Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino: “Using Keet is like passing a piece of paper to a friend.”

No servers, no tracking, a fertile ground for unhinged communication.  

Tether and Holepuch confirmed plans to continue developing the Keet app, adding new features and advocating for privacy in everyday online communication.

Savour the freedom that Keet offers! Download Keet and follow the evolution of private messaging.