Musk Announces Launch of XChat Messenger with 'Bitcoin-Style Encryption'

Elon Musk has announced the launch of a new messenger, XChat, which will run on the X platform. According to him, the application uses so-called "Bitcoin-style encryption."

Musk also said that the messenger was developed in the Rust programming language and supports end-to-end encryption, disappearing messages, file transfers of any format, voice calls, and that the user will not need to provide a phone number to register. However, cryptography experts contacted by CoinDesk expressed doubt about the accuracy of such a definition as "Bitcoin-style encryption." In their opinion, in the Bitcoin blockchain, data is not encrypted in the usual sense - it is signed using cryptographic keys, but is not protected from being read by outsiders.

Thus, the term used by Musk does not refer to any specific encryption technology and may be more of a marketing ploy than a technical characteristic. In addition, experts noted that the use of the Rust language in itself does not guarantee a high level of application security. The main factor remains the quality of the implementation of security algorithms: even the most reliable programming language will not save from vulnerabilities if the code is written with errors or the logical structures contain weak points.

Musk previously changed his profile name and photo on his own X network to "gorklon rust" and tagged the account of Gork, a chatbot that parodies xAI's Grok AI assistant .