Vitalik Donated $760,000 to Two Little-Known Messaging Apps. Here's Why.

When you truly support something, the most direct way is to fund it.

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

In his tweet, he explained that encrypted communication is essential for protecting digital privacy and identified permissionless account creation and metadata privacy as the next critical development priorities.

While $760,000 is substantial, the choice of recipients is particularly noteworthy. Session and SimpleX have minimal name recognition outside the crypto community, and their download numbers and user bases are orders of magnitude smaller than Telegram and WhatsApp. This raises an important question: Why did Vitalik fund these relatively unknown applications instead of more established privacy messaging tools?

The donation amount itself carries significance. The number 128 in binary represents 2 to the power of 7. Some community members interpret this as a deliberate signal from Vitalik, suggesting a structured investment in privacy rather than a casual contribution.

The timing is equally noteworthy. Just one day before the donation, the Council of the European Union reached an agreement on the proposed "Chat Control" regulation, which requires messaging platforms to scan users' private messages. Privacy advocates view this as a direct threat to end-to-end encryption.

By making the donation public at this moment, Vitalik clearly signaled his position: current privacy messaging solutions are insufficient, and more radical alternatives need support.

The market responded swiftly. Session's token SESH surged from below $0.04 to around $0.40 following the announcement, representing a weekly increase exceeding 450%.

This raises a fundamental question: What are these two applications, and why does Vitalik consider them worthy of his support?

Session: Using DePIN for private communication

Session is a decentralized end-to-end encrypted messaging application that officially launched in 2020 and currently has close to one million users.

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

The core selling point of this application is that it does not require a phone number.

During registration, Session generates a 66-character random string as your Session ID and provides you with a set of recovery phrases for account restoration. There is no phone number linking, no email verification, and no information that can be tied to your real identity.

From a technical perspective, Session uses an onion routing style architecture to protect privacy.

Every message you send is encrypted in three layers and passed through three randomly selected nodes. Each node can only decrypt the layer assigned to it and cannot see the full path of the message. This means no single node can know both the sender and the recipient at the same time.

These nodes are not servers operated by Session but are run by the community. There are currently more than 1,500 Session Nodes across more than 50 countries. Anyone can run a node as long as they stake 25,000 SESH tokens.

In May 2025, Session completed an important upgrade by migrating from the Oxen network to its own Session Network. The new network uses a proof of stake consensus model, where node operators stake SESH to participate in network maintenance and receive rewards.

In terms of user experience, Session's interface closely resembles mainstream messaging apps. It supports text, voice messages, images, file transfers, and encrypted group chats of up to 100 people. Voice and video calls remain in the testing phase.

However, there are notable trade-offs. Notification delays are common because messages route through multiple network hops, resulting in delivery times that are several seconds slower than centralized applications, sometimes longer. Multi-device synchronization is also less seamless, a typical limitation of decentralized architecture.

SimpleX: Extreme privacy that does not require even an ID

If Session's selling point is eliminating the phone number requirement, SimpleX goes further: it removes user IDs entirely.

Almost every messaging application, regardless of its privacy claims, assigns users some form of identifier. Telegram and Signal require phone numbers, while Session uses a randomly generated Session ID.

These identifiers leave traces even when not tied to real-world identities. If you use the same account to chat with two different people, those contacts can theoretically confirm they are communicating with the same person.

SimpleX takes a fundamentally different approach by eliminating identifiers altogether. Each time you establish a connection with a new contact, the system generates a unique pair of one-time message queue addresses. The address used for contact A is completely separate from the one used for contact B, with no shared metadata.

Even if someone monitored both conversations simultaneously, they could not prove they originated from the same person.

This design fundamentally changes the SimpleX registration experience. When you open the app, you only need to enter a display name. There is no phone number, no email, and no password required. Your profile is stored entirely on your local device, while SimpleX's servers hold no account information.

Adding contacts works differently as well. You must generate a one-time invitation link or QR code and send it to the other person. A connection is only established after they open the link. There is no "search username to add a friend" function because usernames do not exist in the system.

From a technical perspective, SimpleX uses its own SimpleX Messaging Protocol. Messages are relayed through servers that only store encrypted messages temporarily. These servers maintain no user records and do not communicate with each other. Messages are deleted after delivery, ensuring the servers cannot see your identity or your contacts.

This design is uncompromising, built entirely around privacy protection.

The application is open source on GitHub, where additional technical details are available.

SimpleX was founded in London in 2021 by Evgeny Poberezkin. In 2022, it raised a pre-seed round led by Village Global, with public support from Jack Dorsey. The application is fully open source and has undergone a security audit by Trail of Bits.

In terms of user experience, SimpleX features a clean, minimal interface. It supports text, voice messages, images, files, and self-destructing messages. Group chats are available, though the lack of centralized member list management makes large group interactions less seamless than traditional apps. Voice calls function reliably, while video calls still experience stability issues.

One significant limitation stems from the absence of a unified user ID: changing devices or losing local data requires reconnecting with each contact individually. There is no login system to restore chat history.

This is the trade-off of an extreme privacy design.

Comparison of Business Models: Token Incentives VS Deliberate De-Financialization

Both applications focus on private communication, but they have chosen fundamentally different business models.

Session follows a typical Web3 approach, using tokens to align the interests of network participants. SESH is the native token of the Session Network and currently serves three main purposes:

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

• Node operators earn SESH rewards for providing message routing and storage services

• Future paid features, such as Session Pro membership and the Session Name Service, will be settled in SESH

The logic behind this model is straightforward: node operators have an economic incentive to maintain network stability, the staking requirement increases the cost of malicious behavior, and token circulation provides the project with sustainable funding. SESH currently has a circulating supply of approximately 79 million and a maximum supply of 240 million, with over 62 million SESH locked in the Staking Reward Pool as reserves for node rewards.

After Vitalik's donation, SESH surged from below $0.04 to over $0.20 within hours, with its market capitalization briefly exceeding $16 million. The sharp rise was partly driven by speculation, but it also demonstrates that the market values the "privacy infrastructure" narrative.

SimpleX has taken the opposite path. Founder Evgeny Poberezkin has stated clearly that the project will not issue a tradable token, believing that token speculation would cause the project to drift from its core mission.

SimpleX is currently funded through venture capital and user donations. Its 2022 pre-seed round raised approximately $370,000, with user donations totaling over $25,000. The team plans to introduce Community Vouchers in 2026 to achieve sustainable operations.

Community Vouchers are restricted utility tokens that function as prepaid credits for server usage. Users purchase Vouchers to cover server costs for their community, with funds distributed to server operators and the SimpleX network. The key distinction is that these Vouchers are not tradable, have no pre-mine, have no public sale, and carry a fixed purchase price.

SimpleX has deliberately closed off any possibility of financial speculation.

Each approach has trade-offs. Session's token model can quickly attract node operators and capital, but it also exposes the project to token price volatility and regulatory risk. SimpleX's de-financialized design preserves the project's purity, but limited funding sources mean slower expansion.

This reflects more than a difference in business strategy. It represents fundamentally different interpretations of how privacy should be funded.

Common Challenges in Private Communication

In his tweet, Vitalik praised private communication but was equally clear that both applications are far from perfect. Achieving a truly seamless user experience with robust security remains a distant goal. The issues he highlighted are structural problems facing the entire privacy messaging sector.

The first challenge is the inherent cost of decentralization. Centralized messaging apps deliver fast, stable performance because all data passes through a unified server system that can be heavily optimized. In decentralized systems, messages must hop between multiple independent nodes, making latency unavoidable.

The second challenge is multi-device synchronization. With Telegram or WhatsApp, switching to a new phone simply requires logging in to restore your chat history. In decentralized architectures, no central server stores your data. Multi-device sync must rely on end-to-end key synchronization mechanisms, which are significantly more complex to implement.

The third challenge is protection against Sybil attacks and DoS. Centralized platforms use phone number registration, which naturally filters out spam accounts and malicious activity. Without phone number binding, how can the system prevent mass creation of fake accounts for harassment or network attacks?

Decentralization requires sacrificing some user experience. Permissionless registration demands alternative methods to prevent abuse. Multi-device synchronization involves trade-offs between privacy and convenience.

By funding these two projects at this moment, Vitalik is signaling that these problems are worth solving and that solving them requires both capital and attention.

For regular users, switching to Session or SimpleX may still be premature, as the user experience has noticeable limitations. However, if you care about digital privacy, these applications are worth downloading to experiment with and to understand how far genuine privacy protection can extend.