As part of the project development for Holepunch and Keet, Bitfinex and Tether shall be investing $10 million with higher investments at the later stage.
Crypto exchange Bitfinex is making the most of the bear market to strengthen its technological prowess. Bitfinex has announced its partnership with Tether and Hypercore in order to build a fully encrypted platform Holepunch. Thus, this platform will allow the trio to build peer-to-peer applications.
As part of the new initiative, these companies have launched Keet. It is an encrypted application that will facilitate real-time video and audio calls, file sharing, and text chat. Tether and Bitfinex together have funded the development of the Holepunch platform. Paolo Ardoino, the CTO at Bitfinex and Tether will lead this new initiative as chief strategy officer.
Ardoino said that the new project will help in addressing growing privacy concerns in the market. He added:
“It [Tether and Bitfinex] believes that freedom of choice, communication and finances are the lifeblood of the future, and anything that will enhance those freedoms is worth amplifying. So what we have been working towards is to create a platform that would allow users to access applications that are unstoppable and provide freedom of speech”.
In its alpha and pre-release phase, Holepunch will operate as a close-sourced protocol. The team shall move it to an open-source protocol by the end of 2022. However, Holepunch said that it will not use blockchain technology at its core. Instead, it will be on an in-house payments API powered by the Lightning Network.
FinTech developers building different solutions on the Holepunch protocol will be able to use USDT for micropayments. The companies said that they might announce support for additional stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, later.
Investments Into Holepunch by Bitfinex and Tether
Apart from devoting five years to the project, all three players have also announced some investments. To build Holepunch and Keet, Bitfinex and Tether shall be investing $10 million. Paolo Ardoino said that both these companies are willing to invest an additional $50 million to $100 million in the future as they proceed to build more P2P applications.
Mathias Buus, a self-taught JavaScript hacker from Denmark, will be leading the Holepunch project as its CEO. Buus has been working on open source and P2P projects over the last few years.
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