Vitalik’s 256 ETH nudge: small grant, big privacy vibes
In a move that was loud in intention but quiet in ceremony, Vitalik sent a 256 ETH grant to two privacy-minded messaging projects: Session and SimpleX Chat. It wasn’t a splashy funding round with press releases and ticker-tape—just a targeted push toward an underappreciated corner of the internet: hiding who talks to whom and when.
Why 256 ETH matters (and it’s not about the money)
Yes, 256 ETH isn’t a venture-capital unicorn. That’s the point. The grant is small enough to be humble but big enough to be useful for open-source teams that run on volunteers and coffee. In quieter market seasons, modest sums can actually make a difference: bug fixes, ops costs, quicker releases. More importantly, the gesture signals what deserves attention—privacy engineering built into the bedrock instead of tacked on like an afterthought.
These projects don’t require blockchains to do their thing. They’re standalone tools aimed at reducing metadata—the little breadcrumb trail that shows who’s messaging whom, when, and how often. That’s a different problem than encrypting message text; it’s the mechanical footprint that most apps leak by default.
Two ways to hide the breadcrumbs: Session’s routing vs SimpleX’s identity-free trick
The two projects take very different routes to the same destination: less observable chatter. Session leans into clever routing and decentralized storage. Instead of phone numbers or usernames, users have public-key identities. Messages hop through several relays in onion-style paths so no single node can link sender and recipient. Temporary storage clusters hold encrypted blobs so you don’t have to be online at the same time as your chat pal. There’s even a staking requirement for some relays to make mass-adopted fake nodes expensive and annoying for attackers.
SimpleX flips the problem on its head by stripping persistent identity out of the system entirely. No global usernames, no long-lived IDs—just one-off invites and ephemeral channels. Each conversation uses its own cryptographic keys and all state (contacts, history, channels) stays on your device. Servers merely pass packets without knowing the social graph; they see traffic but can’t neatly stitch it into a map of your relationships.
Put simply: Session builds a hardened, multi-hop pipeline so intermediaries only see tiny puzzle pieces. SimpleX makes it so there’s almost nothing for intermediaries to puzzle over in the first place. Both approaches accept that metadata—not just message content—is the real target.
Whether you prefer route-hardeners or identity-scrubbers, the takeaway is the same: privacy work is technical and specific. Small grants like this highlight concrete engineering solutions that start at the protocol layer rather than pretending privacy is a checkbox on the marketing page.
If we want a healthier internet where conversations don’t leave an obvious trail, these are the kinds of projects worth backing—financially, as contributors, or simply by using them. A quiet donation can be a spotlight: not a promise to change everything, but a nudge toward better defaults.