SimpleX Raises $1.3M from Jack Dorsey & Asymmetric VC, Releases Chat v6.0

• "We are very happy to announce that we now have funds to move faster – we raised a $1.3 million pre-seed round led by Jack Dorsey, with participation of Asymmetric Capital Partners (ACP) VC fund," announced SimpleX.
• Jack Dorsey and ACP's support will allow SimpleX to make significant product advancements, expand its team, and secure medium-term funding for the next stage of growth. The investment comes without control or board seat provisions, ensuring SimpleX remains committed to our privacy-first communication network vision.

"We will also launch long-form email-like messaging over SimpleX network this year, together with optional short public addresses that show profile you are connecting to before the connection – this is important for any public users and businesses," added the project.

• The project also announced it has begun collaborating with legal experts to establish an open-source governance model similar to that of Matrix.

In addition, SimpleX Chat v6.0 stable version has been released with new user experience and private message routing enabled by default.

"v6.0 is one of our biggest releases ever, with a lot of focus on UX and stability improvements, and the new features the users asked for. The private message routing we announced before is now enabled for all users by default – it protects users IP addresses and sessions from the destination servers."

What's new in v6.0

• Messaging protocol improvements that reduce the number of messages required for two users to connect by half, resulting in faster connections, less traffic usage, and quicker message sending.
• New reachable interface. "SimpleX Chat users now can use the app with one hand by moving the toolbar and search bar to the bottom of the screen, and ordering the chats with the most recent conversations in the bottom too, where they can be more easily reached on a mobile screen."
• Archive contacts to chat later option when deleting a conversation.
• New way to start chat. When tapping the pencil button, users will see a large New message sheet, that adds new options such as 'Open archived chats', 'Accept pending contact requests', 'Connect to preset public addresses', and ability to search for contacts.
• New chat themes. "We released the new themes for Android and desktop apps in the previous version, and now they are available for iOS too."
• Improved moderation tools. With this version you can now select up to 20 messages at once and delete or moderate them. This limit will be increased to 200 messages in the next version.
  • This version also blurs profile images of the blocked members.
• Increased font size. Android and desktop apps can now increase font size. This can be changed in Appearance settings. The desktop app now also supports zooming of the whole screen.
• Play media from the chat list. Users can interact with the media directly from the list of the chats.
• Blur for better privacy. "You can set all images and videos to blur in your app, and unblur them on tap (or on hover in desktop app). The blur level can be set in Privacy and security settings."
• Improved networking and reduced battery usage. This version includes statistics on how your SimpleX app communicates with all servers for sending and receiving messages and files. It shows the connection status for each server, whether they are authorized to push messages to your device, and the share of active connections.
  • "This information is only available to your device, we do NOT collect this information, even in the aggregate form," said the developers.

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