Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies during a remote video hearing held by subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on "Social Media's Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation" in Washington, March 25, 2021.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey spent the weekend building Bitchat, a new decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks, with no internet, central servers, phone numbers or emails required.
The Twitter co-founder announced Sunday that the beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub.
In a post on X Sunday Dorsey called it a personal experiment in "bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things."
Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range — even without WiFi or cell service.
Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on-device, disappear by default, and never touch centralized infrastructure — echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.