DarkFi, the privacy project started by crypto anarchist Amir Taaki, launches anonymous app in alpha

DarkFi, the privacy-focused crypto project spearheaded by early Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki, has unveiled a working alpha version of its app. It marks the latest release for the community of coders, artists and technologists that have been quietly tinkering in the shadows for years. 

The app, teased in a pre-alpha release last fall, is essentially a fully anonymous IRC (internet relay chat) today. However, Taaki plans to grow it into a useful product garden. 

“It will be very quick to start expanding, adding, because we already have a lot of features like the anonymous DAO, the wallet, the blockchain,” Taaki told The Block in an interview. “All of that is running already, it's just not in a product.”

Built from the ground up — including an entirely original UI designed by Taaki and his team in-house — the messaging component of the platform can run over Tor and is fully peer-to-peer.

“There's no registration, there's no identity, there's no linkability between messages,” said Taaki. “That's the strongest anonymity that you can get.”

DarkFi’s launch comes at a time both familiar and unsettling to longtime cryptographers. If Taaki had been told in 2011 — when, at the age of 23, he launched Libbitcoin, the first alternative Bitcoin implementation — that privacy advocates like Alexey Pertsev would be prosecuted in the U.S. 14 years later for developing anonymizing tools like Tornado Cash, he likely wouldn’t have been surprised.

A strong ideologue for freedom who took up arms against the Islamic State in Syria in 2015, Taaki has become deeply disillusioned by the direction of the crypto industry.

“Cryptocurrency is about routing around censorship, as Satoshi laid down the gauntlet,” he said. “There’s that that Gnutella/P2P quote where he said ‘we're like a Hydra, you cut a head off, another one pops up. This will expand the space of freedom.”

“But it hasn't played out. Crypto has got institutionally captured because there's been no anonymity. You can't change things if you don't have the offensive means, the use of strong cryptography.”

While Taaki has some reluctant respect for Ethereum’s neutral tech stack, he believes a stronger focus on specific use cases is necessary.

“We're not in 2012 anymore," he said. "We have a good sense of what the core use case is that you need to cater for so you can have a really strong compelling offering for people.” 

He’s also critical of today’s consumer tech. He finds Signal Messenger’s design — potentially a competitor to DarkFi — uninspired.

“It's just an awful looking app, it's just atrocious — the amount of white space, there's just filler, it doesn't efficiently use your screen,” Taaki said. “So the app is not really built for people to be productive.”

Taaki’s goal is ultimately to build functional and freeing technology. He said that DarkFi has taken the time to get the details right—or “consolidated the territory you've taken already”—before rushing out features. 

For one thing, DarkFi’s bespoke UI is natively cross-platform, meaning that it runs across Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows and Linux as a single implementation. That contrasts with Signal, which has two completely different builds between Android and Apple. 

Some assume DarkFi will be difficult to use because of the technology under the hood, but Taaki rejects that idea.

“We're not making an elitist thing," he said. "We are making something that you load it and it works — we're not treating people like stupid cattle.”

That said, Taaki is realistic about the current state of the product, which, in alpha, “is not polished.”

“You know, there’ll be random bugs and stuff,” he said. “But it's good to get things out there.”