No internet? No problem—Twitter founder's new app Bitchat is taking France by storm

Original author: Xiaobing, TechFlow

The French have been very anxious lately.

On October 17, between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets to protest the soaring cost of living. Tear gas and burning trash bins filled the Place de la République in Paris, and over 400 people were arrested nationwide. Former Prime Minister and presidential candidate Gabriel Attal subsequently publicly proposed temporarily blocking social media during the unrest.

Four days later, on October 21, France's largest telecom operator Orange and its sub-brand Sosh suffered a nationwide outage. Calls, text messages, and mobile data were all cut off, lasting for hours and affecting millions of users.

Politicians talked about cutting off social networks, and the carrier really did cut off mobile networks. Yet the French voted with their actions: an app called Bitchat shot straight to the top of France's App Store 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, and it is a messaging tool that works without the internet.

A Chat Tool That Doesn't Need the Internet

Bitchat's core selling point can be summed up in one sentence: you can chat without a network.

It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networking technology. After opening the app, your phone automatically searches for nearby devices also running Bitchat and establishes a direct connection via Bluetooth. Each phone is both a sender and a relay node, and messages can be passed hop by hop between devices, with a theoretical coverage range of about 300 meters. The denser the crowd, the stronger the network.

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

Messages in public channels can be seen by all nearby users, similar to a localized anonymous plaza. Private messages use the Noise Protocol Framework for end-to-end encryption. If the phone has a network connection, Bitchat automatically switches to the Nostr protocol, supporting longer-distance communication and geolocation-based channels.

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

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

It sounds very geeky, but what truly made it go mainstream was never the technology itself.

Every Time the Internet Goes Down, Bitchat Explodes

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

September 2025, Nepal. Gen Z took to the streets in 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. Madagascar saw a similar download wave during the same period, contributing 70,000 downloads in a week.

January 2026, Uganda and Iran. Internet controls 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 skyrocketed 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 equally direct: it first ordered GitHub to remove Bitchat's open-source code repository, then in early October invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act to directly demand that Apple and Google take it down. The website was also blocked by ISPs. The Internet Freedom Foundation called the order unconstitutional, arguing that the legal basis for banning a messaging app cannot be "it works when the internet is down."

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

The difference is that France is the first developed market where this phenomenon has appeared. Previous surges all occurred in developing countries, where people have a visceral fear of "government internet shutdowns." France's situation is more complex: it faced both politicians' threats of blocking and a carrier's technical failure, and the two converged in the same week, pushing Bitchat to the top of the charts.

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 purpose: 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 something widely circulated: "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 had enough of his Bitcoin obsession, but for Dorsey, this wasn't giving up—it was choosing again.

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

At the end of that same year, Dorsey dropped a bombshell on Twitter.

He publicly attacked 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."

Those words offended half of Silicon Valley. a16z partner Chris Dixon shot back with a Gandhi quote, and Dorsey fired right back: "You're a fund wanting to be a media empire, not Gandhi."

In 2022, he also rendered a verdict on Ethereum: "If you're building on ETH, you have at least one, or multiple, single points of failure, so it's of no interest to me."

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

But he didn't just talk.

In 2022, he donated 14 bitcoins (about $245,000 at the time) to Nostr protocol founder fiatjaf. Nostr is a minimalist decentralized social protocol with no company, no board, and no token; anyone can run a relay node, and anyone can build a client 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 add up to more than $30 million. In Silicon Valley terms, that's not a large sum. But in the context of open-source infrastructure, it's a game-changing number. The Nostr protocol now has about 16 million users and 500,000 daily actives, having grown from a geek experiment into a network with a real user base.

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

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

In November 2024, Block cut 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-level infrastructure. Not platforms, but protocols. Not apps, but tools.

In July 2025, Bitchat was released.

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

If you draw everything Dorsey has done over the past five years on a single chart, Bitchat is the latest piece of that puzzle—a 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 media: from open to closed, from idealistic to compromised, and then breaking free from compromise to try to find that original answer again.

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

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