No Internet? No Problem: Twitter Co-Founder's Bitchat Goes Viral in France

Original author: Xiao Bing, Deep Tide TechFlow

The French are very anxious lately.

On Oct. 17, between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets to protest soaring living costs. Tear gas and burning trash cans filled the air at Place de la République in Paris, and more than 400 people were arrested nationwide. Former Prime Minister and presidential candidate Gabriel Attal then publicly proposed temporarily blocking social media during the unrest.

Four days later, on Oct. 21, France's largest telecom operator Orange and its sub-brand Sosh suffered a nationwide outage. Calls, SMS, and mobile data were all disrupted for several hours, affecting millions of users.

Politicians said they would cut off social networks, and telecom operators actually cut off mobile networks. Yet the French voted with their actions: an app called Bitchat shot to No. 1 on the French App Store's social networking download chart, surpassing Telegram and Signal, and broke into the top 10 free apps across all categories.

The creator of this app is Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, and it's software that lets you chat without the internet.

A Chat Tool That Doesn't Need the Internet

Bitchat's core selling point is one sentence: you can chat even without the internet.

It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networking technology. After opening the app, your phone automatically searches for nearby devices also using Bitchat and establishes direct connections via Bluetooth. Each 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 crowd, the stronger the network.

No account registration, no phone number, no email, no centralized servers.

Messages in public channels are visible to all nearby users, similar to a localized anonymous square. Private messages use the Noise Protocol Framework for end-to-end encryption. If the phone has an internet connection, Bitchat automatically switches to the Nostr protocol, supporting longer-distance communication and location-based channels.

There's also a "panic mode": tap the logo three times, and all local data is instantly wiped.

Dorsey released it as a "weekend project" last July, with all code open-sourced. The Android version is written in Kotlin, the iOS version in Swift, and the licenses are MIT and Unlicense respectively. Android users can even transfer the app directly to others via Bluetooth without an app store.

It sounds geeky, but what really made it break out was never the technology itself.

Every Internet Outage Makes Bitchat Explode

Bitchat's spread follows a clear pattern: wherever the internet goes down, it explodes there.

September 2025, Nepal. Gen Z took to the streets to protest, and the government blocked social media. Within a single day, Nepal contributed nearly 50,000 downloads, at one point accounting for 39% of global installs. Around the same time, Madagascar saw a similar download surge, contributing 70,000 downloads in a week.

January 2026, Uganda and Iran. Internet restrictions tightened, and Bitchat downloads climbed again.

July 2026, India. Student protests erupted in New Delhi, and authorities restricted internet access. In just five days from July 17 to 23, over 91,000 Indian users downloaded Bitchat, and India's share of global downloads soared from 1% to 85%. On July 19 alone, daily downloads surged 32-fold, and daily active users exceeded 330,000.

The Indian government's response was also direct: first ordering GitHub to remove Bitchat's open-source code repository, then in early October invoking Section 69A of the Information Technology Act to demand Apple and Google delist it. The website was also blocked by ISPs. The Internet Freedom Foundation called the order unconstitutional, arguing that the legal basis for banning a communication app cannot be that "it works during internet shutdowns."

Now it's France's turn. The pattern is exactly the same: social unrest combined with actual or potential disruption of communication infrastructure, and users flock to an alternative that doesn't rely on traditional networks.

The difference is that France is the first developed-country market to see this phenomenon. Previous outbreaks occurred in developing countries, where people have a visceral fear of "government internet shutdowns." France's situation is more complex: it simultaneously faced politicians' blocking threats and telecom operators' technical failures, with both lines converging in the same week to push Bitchat to the top.

Is this a coincidence? Look at the past twenty years of the man behind it, and you'll find the answer is: no.

Dorsey's Cypherpunk Universe

In 2006, Dorsey founded Twitter, trying to let everyone speak to the whole world.

In 2009, he founded Square, trying to let everyone accept payments.

Both companies grew into giants, but Dorsey became increasingly dissatisfied with them.

Twitter became an algorithm-driven, ad-monetized attention black hole. Square became a payment intermediary that needed banking licenses and compliance teams to operate. They achieved scale but betrayed their original intent: lowering barriers, removing middlemen, and returning power to individuals.

The turning point came in 2021.

That year, at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Dorsey said a widely circulated line: "Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don't think there's anything more important in my lifetime to work on."

A few months later, he stepped down as Twitter CEO.

Insiders say Twitter's executives had had enough of his Bitcoin obsession, but for Dorsey, it wasn't giving up—it was a re-choice.

He renamed Square to Block, and the company bought over 8,000 bitcoins, worth about $170 million. Block's Cash App had launched Bitcoin trading as early as 2018, and later introduced Bitkey (a self-custody Bitcoin wallet) and Proto (Bitcoin mining chips).

Later that year, Dorsey dropped a bombshell on Twitter.

He publicly attacked the hottest Web3 narrative at 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 remark offended half of Silicon Valley. a16z partner Chris Dixon responded with a Gandhi quote, and Dorsey shot back directly: "You're a fund that wants to be a media empire, not Gandhi."

In 2022, he also passed judgment on Ethereum: "If you're building on ETH, you have at least one, if not multiple, single points of failure, and therefore it holds no interest for me."

Dorsey's attitude toward the entire crypto industry can be summed up in one sentence: only Bitcoin. Everything else is noise, or worse, new centralization under the banner of decentralization.

But he doesn't just talk.

In 2022, he donated 14 bitcoins (about $245,000 at the time) to fiatjaf, the founder of the Nostr protocol. Nostr is a minimalist decentralized social protocol with no company, no board, no token. Anyone can run relay nodes, and anyone can build clients on it. In May 2024, through the Start Small Foundation, he donated $21 million to OpenSats, of which $15 million went to Bitcoin open-source development, $5 million specifically to the Nostr ecosystem, and $1 million to operations. He also pledged $5 million to Brink to fund Bitcoin core developers.

These donations total over $30 million. In Silicon Valley terms, that's not a huge amount. But in the context of open-source infrastructure, it's a game-changing figure. The Nostr protocol now has about 16 million users and 500,000 daily active users, growing from a geek experiment into a network with a real user base.

Dorsey also funded Bluesky but later left its board. He posted a meaningful line on Nostr: "There is no Nostr board."

For him, a "decentralized" protocol that needs a board has already gone astray.

In November 2024, Block killed the Web5 project (an ambitious plan to build a decentralized internet layer on Bitcoin) and concentrated resources on Proto and Bitkey. This looks like a strategic retreat, but from another angle: Dorsey is betting on the lowest layer of infrastructure. Not platforms, but protocols. Not applications, but tools.

In July 2025, Bitchat was released.

A chat tool that needs no servers, with Bluetooth as the local communication layer and Nostr as the online communication layer. The code is completely open source. No company operates it, no terms of service, no backdoors.

If you draw everything Dorsey has done over the past five years on a chart, Bitchat is the latest piece of that puzzle—the technical expression of Dorsey's entire cypherpunk worldview.

Dorsey spent twenty years going from creating one of the world's largest social platforms to completely rejecting that model, to tearing everything down and starting over.

The path he has walked is almost a microcosm of the entire history of internet social networking: from open to closed, from ideals to compromise, and then breaking free from compromise to try to find the original answer.

The first line of Bitchat's project manifesto still bears the maxim left by Eric Hughes in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" more than thirty years ago:

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age."