Growing up in the early nineties granted children access to the digital Wild West. No cookie settings, no passwords, complete anonymity. You could pretend to be anybody you wanted, which was also kind of fun for a young kid. The opportunities to speak with anyone on the planet and build new digital tools and systems seemed limitless. This was the backdrop to how a California skater kid learned to code.

Jeff Gardner, founder of White Noise, cut his teeth in the traditional VC-backed tech startup ecosystem.

“I remember working in one of the early tech startups, and we were implementing and deleting things in the app. 'Deleting' meant adding a flag in the database. It was 'deleted', but not actually deleted. It wasn't removed from the database.”

After initially holding a naive view of free services from Big Tech, he saw freedoms curtailed during COVID, which made him consider the systems he contributed to and used.

“When I saw Nostr, I understood that this was the way out. This is our escape hatch. We can go back to an early open Internet where it's actually owned and run by the users rather than owned and run by five companies.”

After seeing the possibilities of protocols like Nostr, Gardner closed down his startup and began to build decentralized systems.

A Renewed Drive for Freedom

According to Gardner, the entire premise of Silicon Valley tech has been built on hacking the weak points of the human brain to monetize users, rather than finding customers and providing a valuable service.

“I've got three little kids,” he says, “and we're at the point where our oldest is starting to use digital things. It's a one-way door, right? Every time you add your name to a website, every time you put a picture of yourself online, you really can't get it back. The Internet is a copy machine.”

The only exit from that system is not to give companies the data in the first place, but that requires parallel privacy services for email, social, chat, and more.

After 2020, Gardner’s forays into the Nostr developer community led him to form a group with the idea of fixing messaging. One major issue was that messages showed all the metadata around who was talking to whom. Ultimately, this led to NIP 17, a ‘band aid’ which fixed the metadata issue, but not the clunky and poorly scaled group messaging.

While privacy-focused chat may not be in the mainstream consciousness just yet, it is growing (Signal App posted user numbers of 70 million in 2024). Gardner sees a wide range of privacy-seeking niche groups who could benefit from a decentralized, scalable privacy chat.

“Writers have sources,” he explained, “and they have to talk together and gather information, while protecting their sources. If you want to use Signal to do that right now, it's connected to your phone number and, therefore, your identity. With Nostr being an open protocol, you can create as many identities as you want. They're all just key pairs. You can talk to your different sources or your different sources of information or whatever. Totally different identities as different people.”

With 72% of the world living under authoritarian regimes , there is a growing number of high-risk actions when it comes to platforms connected to real-world identities. Gardner and the White Noise team adhere to the cypherpunk ethos that open, unstoppable protocols are a net positive for people all around the world to have.

Do We Really Need Another App?

When asked about the need for another chat app, Gardner pointed to the unique nature of White Noise being decentralized, encrypted, and scalable.

Although the forward secrecy and post-compromise security of the Signal algorithm are considered the gold standard of encryption, the organization itself represents a single point of failure.

“The one big drawback of Signal is that they are a big centralized entity, and they have to spend $50,000,000 a year on servers. And that means that if they ran out of funding or they had to shut down their system, Signal would just disappear for everybody overnight.”

Gardner’s White Noise project aims for Signal-level encryption capabilities and privacy, but on a resilient open protocol where the servers themselves can be swapped out.

Marmot — The Decentralized Privacy Stack

To build White Noise, Gardner published Marmot — an open protocol harnessing Messaging Layer Security (MLS), Nostr, and Blossom.

“Using the Marmot protocol means we can make interoperable clients. So instead of having just the Signal app that can talk to just the Signal app, we can have White Noise that can talk to Primal or White Noise that can talk to Amethyst on Android.”

He stressed the need for open-source contributors and ‘more eyes’ to ensure Marmot and White Noise remain secure and optimized for more users (the protocol is in the middle of its very first audit right now).

The overall aim with Marmot was to be able to encrypt direct messages (but also group messages) with hopefully arbitrarily large groups, up to the millions. Gardner went on to explain exactly how Marmot functions:

“MLS is a good framework for key agreement and sharing of keys in a large group in a way that keeps forward-secrecy and post-compromise security. What happens when you start an MLS group is that I create it with just me in it. You give me your key that you want me to use, and I invite you to the group with that key. And then I send you a welcome message with just enough information that you can then construct the identical version of the group state, which is called the ratchet tree on your side.

So now we both have a copy of this ratchet tree. Right? Side by side. And as we keep talking and things change over time, so say I add someone else to the chat, which basically adds a state or changes the state of the group in some predictable way.”

The Path Forward

So far, White Noise has relied on generous grants from OpenSats and the Human Rights Foundation among donors. In the coming months, the project will be registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means that donations from any individual or entity in the US will be tax-deductible.

“Taking in donations from a variety of sources is a really important part for us,” continues Gardner. “We don't wanna end up in a situation like ToR, where a vast portion of their funding comes from one source, which can dry up. And so I think we'll push really hard on using that cool feature of Nostr that people can just zap you.”

A Call for Developers

When asked how others can get involved in the project, Gardner stressed the need for more developers to join the cause. “Just go on GitHub, see the code, look at the issue list, pick something you wanna work on, or just pick something you wanna work on and send us a PR.”

Building connections, as well as submitting perfect code, is important when working on open-source projects in the freedom space.

Finally, Gardner summed up the current challenges facing the project.

“For White Noise to even be able to credibly compete even closely with Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram, we've got to build a lot of things, and we've got to do it really well. I think that we do need to shift that conversation away from censorship resistance and talk more about the things that you can only do on Nostr, like getting zaps.”

Visit the White Noise website to download the app or message the team about donations or development.

Interview by:

Philip Charter is a totally human author , editor, and writer for leaders and companies in the freedom tech space. He successfully escaped the bad British weather and now lives in Gran Canaria, Spain.