Status, an Ethereum Private Messenger Goes Waku on Telegram

Startup Status raised $100 M in its 2017 initial coin offering on the premise of building a private messenger based on the Whisper protocol that allows Ethereum DApps to communicate.

Each smartphone that runs a Status app becomes a node, and all the messaging runs on a peer-to-peer network which is censorship-resistant.

Picking up where Ethereum dropped offWhisper currently allows for only about 100 daily users according to the company's simulations.

"Whisper has scalability issues. When we were doing our ICO, we believed that the Ethereum Foundation was going to keep working on Whisper to improve scalability; however, Ethereum had to focus on other issues", Corey Petty, Status' head of security, shared with Cointelegraph.

Going WakuStatus has been working on the fork of the Whisper protocol for a couple of years to solve some of the scalability issues.

This new protocol is called Waku and the current version can handle up to 1,000 daily users.

For Status to compete with mainstream giants such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal the company is simultaneously working on another modular peer-to-peer messaging stack from the ground up.

"We don't rely on central servers, everything is p2p. All the messaging is routed via go-ethereum. Everything is open-source, users can verify, fork, upgrade our product".

Beyond the technology, Status is also focusing on marketing its product to end-users.

While Telegram is entangled in a legal quagmire, it may be Status' time to shine.