Not too long ago, tens of millions of users on mainstream social media in the United States abandoned Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, and switched to niche social platforms that pay more attention to privacy, making Signal and Telegram grow exponentially. Signal added 1.3 million users on January 10 alone. The surging traffic directly overwhelmed Signal’s servers, causing the servers to be down for nearly 24 hours.
Telegram announced that the total number of users exceeded 500 million, and 25 million new users poured in between January 9th and January 11th. In the words of Telegram founder Paul Durov, the United States is undergoing “the largest digital migration in history.”
An important reason for this migration was the joint “purge and suppression” of Trump, and the right-wing groups that support Trump, by the major US technology giants. The motivation to find new social tools is not just because of political differences, but increasing concerns about personal privacy and the vigilance of large Internet companies’ abuse of power and monopoly status too. Although the technology giants all stated that the original intention of this action was to clean up extreme statements inciting violence on the Internet, the important thing is not the result, but the legitimacy of the process.
In the field of encrypted communication of the future, the foundation is absolutely secure encrypted communication. The problem of its development is: Who should define the rules of product governance, and who checks this huge power to make law? In order to solve this dilemma Coming came into being.
So, what is Coming?
A blockchain encrypted communication software developed by the ChainX and Coming development team, based on the Signal protocol. To achieve the same level of encrypted communication as the Signal App, ChainX will be introduced as the database of Coming’s Identity Key to store decentralized identities on the blockchain. Key systems of the Signal protocol match the attributes of ChainX, making it possible for Coming to add its own cryptocurrency transaction function on top of that.
Some noteworthy characteristics of Coming that make it different to traditional communication apps are the following three:
- Coming does not use any third-party to register. Unlike Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal, Coming does not require users to provide email, mobile phone number or other information to register an account. Instead, it uses a private key system to manage the account like traditional blockchain projects. All account rights are given to users, and because no third-party identification information is exposed, Coming is even better in terms of privacy security. The only information visible to users is their Coming ID.
- Compared with traditional cryptocurrency wallets, Coming can transfer XBTC within seconds rather than minutes. As blockchain technology becomes more and more popular to the average user, cryptocurrency will enter a larger market of fast peer-to-peer payments. Coming will realize the same convenient cryptocurrency transfers as WeChat does cash transfers. XBTC, being a BTC mapping and thus having the same value as BTC, can be recharged, withdrawn, and transferred in Coming, with more currencies coming in the future.
- Similar to ChainX, Coming wants to allow users to supervise the system and assign governance rights to users. Users participate in legislation and justice, so as to achieve checks and balances of rights. If a user finds that someone is committing a behavior that violates ethics or the law, they can report it through Coming’s governance function. The system will classify the behavior according to the governance bill, and then conduct a referendum. The result of the referendum determines how to deal with the crime according to user governance.
The ChainX and Coming development teams have and are still investing a lot of energy in the Coming project and plan to launch the official version of Coming in the first half of 2021.
About ChainX
- Official Website: https://chainx.org
- Github: https://github.com/chainx-org/ChainX
- Desktop wallet: https://dapps.chainx.org
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainx_org
- Medium: https://chainx-org.medium.com
- Telegram: https://t.me/chainx_org
- White paper: English white paper PDF
- Official Wechat: interchain
