Bitcoin Maxi Jack Dorsey Unveils New Open Source Group Chat App

Tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey has announced a new group chat platform aimed at reducing teams’ reliance on platforms like Slack, in the Bitcoin maxi’s latest push for decentralization. 

The Block co-founder wrote Tuesday on X that the new app, named Buzz, was “for teams of people and agents of all sizes” and “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.”

Described as “A new native workspace for human and agent teams” on its website, Buzz users can “chat with teammates and specialized agents in one shared space, then move straight into planning, project management, coding, and PRs.”

A statement from parent company Block said that the new app was built on decentralized social networking Nostr protocol.

“The interface will feel familiar to anyone who’s used a modern team communication tool,” Block added. 

“Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, said. 

“The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”

Decentralize everything 

Dorsey, whose firm Block owns companies Square and Cash App, has long been pushing for decentralized solutions: primarily with Bitcoin. 

The billionaire founder of Twitter left the social media company to focus his efforts on payments and Bitcoin adoption in 2021, saying he wants the cryptocurrency to be the global currency and “everyday money.” 

He has also described Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper as “poetry.”

Cash App allows users to send and receive and buy and sell Bitcoin and point-of-sale terminals Square accept the orange coin via the Lightning Network. 

Block also last year debuted a Bitcoin mining rig with swappable parts, with the idea that miners could cut costs on repairing and replacing the devices.