Satellite Core Early Access Reloaded

A cycle of building, learning, and discovering better ways to build our platform.

Last month, we announced the impending launch of Early Access for our decentralized voice/video/text application, Satellite Core. All of our teams have been hard at work across the company — UI/UX, Dev, QA, business, everybody across twelve time zones has been working together to button up everything we needed for an EA launch in July…

.…And then, our R&D team developed a new protocol to address some centralization and scaling issues that we were encountering. The project internally we have been calling Iridium was too exciting to put on hold.

We are committed to building a secure and decentralized chat application for everyone. The Iridium library is a major change in how Satellite Core works and will allow us to make huge leaps toward those goals. Those significant changes include:

• Moving accounts and profile data off of the blockchain and into IPFS and making it easy for users to secure their account with a whole variety of wallets and chains, or no chain at all
• Replacing a more traditional (and centralized) API that we sent encrypted user data to, which would in turn pinned it to IPFS, to a library that runs IPFS locally in the browser and syncs/pins your encrypted data with our (and soon, your own) IPFS nodes directly
• Allowing Satellite Core to use more cutting-edge open protocols and standards like DID (Decentralized Identifiers) and JOSE (dag-jose encryption) that are gaining popularity and allow easier integrations with other platforms that are adopting these technologies

Our long-term plans are still to bring all the benefits from this Iridium library into Warp, our cross-platform/modular web assembly framework, after we get to Early Access with Satellite Core. In the meantime, our teams are hard at work integrating Iridium, and a new date for Early Access will be announced soon; once we reach feature parity with our old branch and are able to schedule our security audits.

We are excited to show you what we’ve been building soon. If you have any questions or would like to know more, join our community on Discord and say hello!