Twitter Founder Creates an Offline Chat App That's Blowing Up in France
Written by: Xiao Bing, TechFlow
The French have been anxious lately.
On October 17, between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets to protest soaring living costs. Tear gas and burning trash cans filled Paris's Place de la République, and over 400 people were arrested nationwide. Former Prime Minister and presidential candidate Gabriel Attal subsequently made a public proposal: temporarily ban social media during the unrest.
Four days later, on October 21, France's largest telecommunications provider, Orange, and its sub-brand Sosh, experienced a nationwide outage. Calls, texts, and mobile data were completely cut off for several hours, affecting millions of users.
Politicians talked about cutting off social networks, while carriers actually cut off mobile networks. However, the French voted with their actions: an app called Bitchat immediately shot to number one on the French App Store's Social Networking download chart, surpassing Telegram and Signal, and breaking into the top ten free apps across all categories.
The creator of this app is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the developer of software that allows chatting without an internet connection.
A Chat Tool That Doesn't Need the Internet
Bitchat's core selling point boils down to one sentence: You can chat without an internet connection.
It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networking technology. Once you open the app, your phone automatically searches for nearby devices also running Bitchat and establishes a direct connection via Bluetooth. Every phone acts as both a sender and a relay node, allowing messages to hop from device to device. The theoretical coverage range is about 300 meters, and the denser the population, the stronger the network becomes.
No account registration required. No phone number needed. No email required. No central servers.
Messages in public channels are visible to all nearby users, functioning like a localized anonymous square. Private chats use the Noise Protocol Framework for end-to-end encryption. If your phone has an internet connection, Bitchat automatically switches to the Nostr protocol, supporting long-range communication and location-based channels.
There's also a "panic mode": triple-tap the logo to instantly wipe all local data.
Dorsey released it last July as a "weekend project." The code is fully open-source; the Android version is written in Kotlin and the iOS version in Swift, licensed under MIT and Unlicense respectively. Android users can even share the app directly with others via Bluetooth without going through an app store.
It sounds highly geeky, but what truly brought it into the mainstream was never the technology itself.
Every Time the Internet Goes Down, Bitchat Booms
Bitchat's spread follows a clear pattern: wherever the internet goes down, Bitchat explodes in popularity.
September 2025, Nepal. Gen Z protesters took to the streets while the government blocked social media. Within a single day, Nepal accounted for nearly 50,000 downloads, temporarily representing 39% of global installs. Madagascar saw a similar download surge at the same time, contributing 70,000 downloads within a week.
January 2026, Uganda and Iran. Stricter internet controls caused Bitchat download numbers to climb again.
July 2026, India. Student protests erupted in New Delhi, prompting authorities to restrict internet access. In just five days from July 17 to 23, over 91,000 Indian users downloaded Bitchat. India's share of global downloads skyrocketed from 1% to 85%. On July 19 alone, daily downloads surged 32-fold, pushing daily active users past 330,000.
The Indian government's response was equally direct: it first ordered GitHub to take down Bitchat's open-source code repository, then cited Section 69A of the Information Technology Act in early October to demand Apple and Google remove the app from their stores. Access to the website was also blocked by ISPs. The Internet Freedom Foundation declared the order unconstitutional, arguing that banning a communication app cannot be legally justified merely because "it works offline."
Now it's France's turn. The pattern is identical: social unrest combined with actual or potential disruptions to communication infrastructure drives users toward an alternative that doesn't rely on traditional networks.
The difference is that France marks the first time this phenomenon has occurred in a developed market. Previous surges happened in developing countries, where citizens had firsthand fear of "government internet shutdowns." France's situation is more complex; it simultaneously faced political threats of blocking and carrier technical failures. These two threads converged within the same week, propelling Bitchat to the top spot.
Is this a coincidence? Look at that person behind it over the past twenty years, and you'll find the answer is: no.
Dorsey's Cyberpunk Universe
In 2006, Dorsey founded Twitter, aiming to let everyone speak to the whole world.
In 2009, he founded Square, aiming to let everyone accept payments.
Both companies grew into giants, but Dorsey became increasingly dissatisfied with them.
Twitter became an algorithm-driven, ad-monetized black hole for attention. Square became a payment intermediary requiring banking licenses and compliance teams to operate. They achieved scale, but betrayed their original mission: lower barriers, remove middlemen, and return power to individuals.
The turning point came in 2021.
That year, Dorsey said a widely quoted line at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami: "Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don't think there's anything more important in my lifetime to work on."
A few months later, he resigned as Twitter CEO.
Insiders said Twitter executives had grown tired of his obsession with Bitcoin, but for Dorsey, this wasn't a surrender—it was a deliberate pivot.
He renamed Square to Block, and the company purchased over 8,000 bitcoins worth approximately $170 million. Block's Cash App launched bitcoin trading as early as 2018, followed by the release of Bitkey (a self-custody bitcoin wallet) and Proto (a bitcoin mining chip).
Late that same year, Dorsey dropped a bombshell on Twitter.
He publicly criticized the hottest Web3 narrative of the time: "You don't own 'web3.' The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label."
This comment offended half of Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon fired back using a Gandhi quote, to which Dorsey bluntly replied: "You're a fund trying to build a media empire, not Gandhi."
In 2022, he passed judgment on Ethereum as well: "If you build on ETH, you have at least one, if not multiple, single points of failure, so it's of zero interest to me."
Dorsey's attitude toward the entire crypto industry can be summed up in one phrase: only Bitcoin. Everything else is noise, or worse, a new form of centralism flying the banner of decentralization.
But he doesn't just talk the talk.
In 2022, he donated 14 bitcoins (worth approximately $245,000 at the time) to fiatjaf, the founder of the Nostr protocol. Nostr is an extremely minimalist decentralized social protocol: no company, no board, no tokens. Anyone can run a relay node, and anyone can build clients on it. In May 2024, he donated $21 million to OpenSats through his Start Small foundation, allocating $15 million to Bitcoin open-source development, $5 million specifically to the Nostr ecosystem, and $1 million to operations. He also committed $5 million to Brink to fund Bitcoin core developers.
These donations total over $30 million. In the context of Silicon Valley, the sum isn't massive. But in the realm of open-source infrastructure, it's a game-changing figure. Today, the Nostr protocol boasts around 16 million users and 500,000 daily active users, transforming from a geek experiment into a network with a real user base.
Dorsey also funded Bluesky, but later stepped down from its board. He posted a telling remark on Nostr: "There is no Nostr board."
To him, a "decentralized" protocol that requires a board has already gone astray.
In November 2024, Block axed the Web5 project (an ambitious plan to build a decentralized internet layer on Bitcoin) and consolidated resources onto Proto and Bitkey. This may look like a strategic pullback, but viewed differently: Dorsey is betting heavily on foundational infrastructure. Building protocols, not platforms. Building tools, not applications.
In July 2025, Bitchat was released.
A chat tool that requires no servers. Bluetooth serves as the local communication layer, while Nostr acts as the online communication layer. The code is entirely open-source. No corporate operator, no terms of service, no backdoors.
If you plotted everything Dorsey has done over the past five years on a single diagram, Bitchat would be the latest piece—the technological embodiment of Dorsey's complete cyberpunk worldview.
Dorsey spent twenty years moving from building one of the world's largest social platforms, to completely rejecting that model, to tearing it all down and starting over.
His journey is almost a microcosm of the entire history of internet social networking: from openness to closure, from idealism to compromise, and finally breaking free from that compromise in an attempt to rediscover the original answer.
The very first line of Bitchat's project manifesto page remains unchanged, echoing a maxim left by Eric Hughes in his "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" over thirty years ago:
"In the electronic age, privacy is essential for an open society."