Vitalik donated 256 ETH to 2 chat apps you've never heard of, what exactly is he betting on?

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

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The most direct way to support something you truly believe in is to give it money.

On November 26, Vitalik Buterin donated 128 ETH, worth approximately $760,000, to two privacy communication applications, Session and SimpleX.

He wrote in a tweet: Encrypted communication is essential for protecting digital privacy, and the key next step is to achieve permissionless account creation and metadata privacy.

$760,000 is not a small amount, but what is even more curious are these two money-receiving applications.

Session and SimpleX have almost no recognition outside the crypto circle. Why did Vitalik choose to invest in them instead of more mature privacy communication tools?

The donation amount itself is also interesting.

128 is not a convenient number for humans, but in binary, it is 2 to the power of 7. Some community members interpret this as a statement from Vitalik, indicating that this is a structural privacy investment, not just a casual tip.

Just a day before the donation, the EU Council reached an agreement on the “Chat Control” proposal. This proposal requires communication platforms to scan users' private messages, which privacy advocates see as a direct threat to end-to-end encryption.

Vitalik chose to make a public donation at this time, and his stance is already very clear: he believes that existing privacy communication solutions are not enough and that more radical alternatives need support.

The market seems to have understood this signal as well. The token SESH of Session rose from less than $0.04 to around $0.40 after the news was announced, with a weekly increase of over 450%.

Let's take a quick look at what these two applications are and why they are worth betting on by Vitalik.

Session, using DePIN for private communication

Session is a decentralized end-to-end encrypted communication application that was officially launched in 2020 and currently has nearly 1 million users.

It was originally developed by the Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation in Australia. In 2024, due to tightening privacy legislation in Australia, the team moved the operating entity to Switzerland and established the Session Technology Foundation.

The core selling point of this app is “no phone number required.”

When registering, the Session will generate a 66-character random string as your Session ID, and provide you with a set of mnemonic words for account recovery. There is no phone number binding, no email verification, and no information that can be linked to your real identity.

Technically, Session uses an architecture similar to onion routing to ensure privacy.

Every message you send will be encrypted in three layers, passing through three randomly selected nodes in sequence. Each node can only decrypt its own layer and cannot see the complete path of the message. This means that no single node can know both the sender and the receiver of the message at the same time.

These nodes are not servers officially operated by Session, but rather come from the community. Currently, there are over 1,500 Session Nodes distributed across more than 50 countries, and anyone can run a node, provided they stake 25,000 SESH tokens.

In May 2025, Session completed a significant upgrade, migrating from the previously relied upon Oxen network to its own Session Network. The new network is based on a Proof of Stake consensus, where node operators participate in network maintenance by staking SESH and earn rewards.

In terms of actual experience, the interface of Session is not much different from mainstream messaging applications. It supports text, voice messages, image and file transfer, and also allows encrypted group chats with up to 100 people. Voice and video calls are currently still in the testing phase.

One obvious drawback is the notification delay. Due to the need for messages to go through multiple hops, sometimes the arrival of messages can be several seconds or even longer behind that of centralized applications. Multi-device synchronization is also not smooth enough, which is a common issue in decentralized architectures.

SimpleX, an extreme privacy solution that doesn't even require an ID.

If Session's selling point is “no need for a phone number,” SimpleX is even more radical:

It doesn't even have a user ID.

Almost all communication applications on the market, no matter how much they emphasize privacy, will assign some kind of identifier to users. Telegram uses phone numbers, Signal uses phone numbers, and Session uses randomly generated Session IDs.

These identifiers can leave traces even if they are not linked to a real identity: if you chat with two people using the same account, theoretically, these two people can confirm that they are communicating with the same person.

SimpleX's approach is to completely eliminate this identifier. Every time you establish a connection with a new contact, the system generates a pair of one-time message queue addresses. The address you use to chat with A is completely different from the address you use to chat with B, with no shared metadata.

Even if someone monitors both conversations at the same time, they cannot prove that they come from the same person.

Even if someone monitors both conversations at the same time, they cannot prove that they come from the same person.

The registration experience of SimpleX is therefore unique. After opening the app, you only need to enter a display name, no phone number is required, no email is required, and you don't even need to create a password. This profile is completely stored on your local device, and there is no account information of yours on SimpleX's servers.

The method of adding contacts is also different. You need to generate a one-time invitation link or QR code and send it to the other party. They can only establish a connection after clicking on it. There is no “search username to add friends” feature because there is simply no username to search.

In terms of technical architecture, SimpleX uses its own developed SimpleX Messaging Protocol. Messages are transmitted through relay servers, but these servers only temporarily store encrypted messages and do not retain any user records, nor do they communicate with each other. Once the message is delivered, it is deleted. The servers cannot see who you are or who you are chatting with.

This design is extreme and completely considers privacy protection.

By the way, this application has been open-sourced on GitHub, and here is more information.

SimpleX was founded by Evgeny Poberezkin in London in 2021. In 2022, it secured seed funding in a pre-seed round led by Village Global, with Jack Dorsey publicly expressing his endorsement of the project. The application is fully open-source and has passed a security audit by Trail of Bits.

In terms of actual experience, SimpleX has a relatively simple interface that supports text, voice messages, images, files, and self-destructing messages. There is a group chat feature as well, but due to the lack of centralized member list management, the experience for large groups is not as good as traditional applications. Voice calls are available, but there are still some stability issues with video calls.

One notable limitation is that due to the lack of a unified user ID, if you change devices or lose local data, you need to reconnect with each contact. There is no “login account to recover all chat records”.

This is also the cost of extreme privacy design.

Comparison of two application business models: Token Incentives vs Deliberate De-financialization

Both applications are doing private communication, but their business model choices are completely different.

Session follows a typical Web3 approach, binding the interests of network participants together with tokens. SESH is the native token of Session Network, and it has three main uses:

Running a node requires staking 25,000 SESH as collateral;

Node operators earn SESH rewards by providing messaging routing and storage services.

In the future, there will also be paid features such as Session Pro membership and Session Name Service settled with SESH.

The logic of this model is: node operators have economic incentives to maintain network stability, the staking mechanism increases the cost of malicious behavior, and the circulation of tokens provides a sustainable funding source for the project. Currently, the circulation of SESH is approximately 79 million, with a maximum supply of 240 million, and over 62 million SESH are locked in the Staking Reward Pool as reserves for node rewards.

After Vitalik's donation, SESH rose from less than $0.04 to over $0.20 within a few hours, with a market cap briefly surpassing $16 million. This surge, of course, has elements of riding the trend, but it also indicates that the market is pricing the narrative of “privacy infrastructure.”

SimpleX's choice is completely the opposite. The founder, Evgeny Poberezkin, clearly stated that he would not issue tradable tokens because he believes that the speculative nature of tokens would deviate the project from its original purpose.

SimpleX's current funding sources are VC financing and user donations. The seed round financing in 2022 was approximately $370,000, and user donations totaled over $25,000. The team plans to launch Community Vouchers in 2026 for sustainable operations.

Community Vouchers are a type of restricted utility token that can be understood as prepaid server usage vouchers. Users purchase Vouchers to pay for the server costs of their community, and the funds are distributed to the server operators and the SimpleX network. The key distinction is that these Vouchers are non-tradable, have no pre-mining, are not publicly sold, and the price is fixed at the time of purchase.

It seems that SimpleX deliberately blocked the possibility of financial speculation.

Both routes have their pros and cons. The token model of Session can quickly attract attention from node operators and capital, but it also exposes the project to price volatility and regulatory risks. The de-financialization design of SimpleX maintains the purity of the project, but the funding sources are limited, which will slow down the expansion speed.

This is not just a divergence in business strategy; it also reflects different understandings of “how privacy should be funded.”

Common challenges in privacy communication

Vitalik did not just say nice things in his donation tweet. He pointed out clearly:

Both of these applications are not perfect, and there is still a long way to go to achieve a true user experience and security. The several challenges he mentioned are actually structural issues within the entire privacy communication track.

The first cost is the decentralization itself. Centralized applications have fast, stable, and smooth messaging because all data goes through the same set of servers, allowing for significant optimization. Once it moves towards decentralization, messages have to jump between multiple independent nodes, and delays become unavoidable.

The second is multi-device synchronization. With Telegram or WhatsApp, when you log in to your account on a different phone, your chat history comes back. However, under a decentralized architecture, there is no central server to store your data, so multi-device synchronization relies on an end-to-end key synchronization mechanism, which is much more complex to implement.

The third is Sybil attacks and DoS protection. Centralized platforms use phone number registration, which inherently creates a barrier to filter out spam accounts and malicious attacks. If the phone number binding is removed, how can we prevent someone from creating fake accounts in bulk to harass users or attack the network?

To achieve decentralization, some user experience must be sacrificed; to allow permissionless registration, alternative methods to prevent abuse need to be found; to enable multi-device synchronization, trade-offs between privacy and convenience must be made.

Vitalik chose to fund these two projects at this time, in a way expressing that these issues are worth solving, and solving them requires funding and attention.

For ordinary users, it may still be too early to switch to Session or SimpleX, as there are indeed shortcomings in the experience. However, if you care about your digital privacy, it is at least worth downloading to try and understand the extent of what “real privacy” can achieve.

After all, when Vitalik is willing to put real money into something, it is highly likely that it is not just a geek's self-indulgence.