As you may have heard, a few months ago it was announced that the Session chat app migrated its infrastructure to Arbitrum.
It would be great if we, as delegates, could learn more about Session, try it out, and support a product and team that are now part of the Arbitrum family.
What is Session?
Session is a chat app and a fork of the well-known privacy-focused app Signal.
The main difference is that Signal’s infrastructure is centralized, while Session runs on decentralized infrastructure where anyone can run a node.
@tamara and I got in touch with the Session team and asked them about presenting Session to the delegates. We believe Session could play a great role when it comes to distribution and user acquisition - one of the main topics in our SOS discussions.
We’ll coordinate a community call with the Session team (likely in the first half of September) and will post the date here once it’s confirmed. In the meantime, feel free to try out the app and share any feedback or questions you might have here in this topic.
Generally I believe it is great to have Session on Arbitrum since it’s one of the few consumer Apps in the space who were able to figure out product-market-fit.
My invitation to other delegates would be to share ahead of the call
What would you like the team to present?
Any product feedback/improvement suggestions
Additionally it would be great to think about how we as the DAO can support them (thinking with a more “incubator” mindset) - what protocols could be complementary, what features do we think can attract a new cohort of users, who in your contacts could be an asset for them.
Thanks @TempeTechie and @tamara, great initiative I’ll participate with interest.
From my perspective the first step is to understand what they plan in terms of wallet functionality.
From my last test, Session is an excellent messaging app but had no ability to manage funds / operate onchain: having that capability would unlock an entirely new universe of possibilities, though it obviously depends on the team’s long term vision .
A quick update: Session team will present their chat app and their network infrastructure to the Arbitrum DAO in a conference call on 2 September at 1 PM UTC.
The event has been added to the Arbitrum DAO calendar (you can find the call link there too).
We had a really interesting community call on Tuesday with the Session Chat team (Chris and Kee). They walked us through their app and the decentralized network it runs on.
Session originally launched on a clone of Monero, but they’ve since migrated their infra to Arbitrum One.
Basically, if you want to run a Session node, you need to stake SESH tokens on Arbitrum One.
On top of Arbitrum One, they’ve built what they call the Session Appchain (aka Workchain). This is not an EVM chain and is not meant for smart contracts. Instead, it’s used purely for Session’s own network needs: tracking node states, snapshotting consensus, and posting proofs (BLS signatures) back to Arbitrum One.
You can read more about it in the Session docs (they describe this appchain as an L1, but I’d say it’s more like a sidechain or maybe even an L3 since it has a dependency on Arbitrum One).
For privacy of users and protecting their IP addresses, Session uses onion routing for text messaging (similar to Tor network). Session also doesn’t require a phone number for having an account, which helps prevent SIM-swap account takeovers (a problem we’ve seen a lot with Telegram).
Besides the overview of the technical infrastructure, they also talked about the future roadmap. One thing that stood out for us in the Arbitrum DAO was their plan to integrate an EVM wallet directly inside the Session app. No concrete timeline yet, but definitely something to keep an eye on.
At the end of the call we had a nice debate with lots of questions from delegates, and brainstormed how the DAO could support consumer-facing apps like Session.
Just a quick update: I’ve connected the Session team with Norah and Ricardo from AF, who lead the Ambassadors program (they presented it to the DAO last month). The idea is for the Session team to give a presentation to ambassadors, who can then showcase the app at their local meetups.
Norah and Ricardo are also open to suggestions for other Arbitrum-based apps and protocols that could be presented to ambassadors in the same way. If you have any ideas, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll forward them.
