Building the World's Most Private Messaging App: Session's Decentralized Journey with Kee Jefferys

Colors of Web3 & Entrepreneurship

In the 66th episode of Colors of Web3 and Entrepreneurship, host Lam Trinh is joined by Kee Jefferys, the technical co-founder of Session. Kee shares his journey from university dropout to building a decentralized, censorship-resistant messaging network with over 2,200 global nodes and 1.2M+ monthly users. We dive deep into onion routing, proof-of-stake infrastructure, the economics behind Session’s token incentives, and how privacy-focused tools are crucial in the age of surveillance and AI.⌛ Timestamps:00:00:00 Episode trailer 00:00:28 Intro & Kee’s self-intro 00:01:53 Kee’s background 00:02:56 Privacy tech & Session idea 00:04:13 Internship & company launch 00:05:27 Why degrees matter less 00:07:11 Getting into Web3 without CS degree 00:08:32 How Kee first learned about Web3 (Mt. Gox) 00:10:57 Early Bitcoin education 00:12:51 Market cycles in crypto 00:13:42 Kee's hobbies: Coding & rock climbing 00:15:01 Favorite programming language & AI tools00:17:29 AI's role in developer work 00:20:00 What is Session? 00:21:44 Decentralized network architecture of session 00:25:35 Censorship resistance property of Session 00:27:24 How metadata is stored in Session 00:29:47 Onion routing explained 00:32:55 Tor vs. Session 00:34:12 Privacy in routing 00:35:40 Spam protection 00:37:37 Token farming issues in messaging apps 00:39:11 Organic user growth 00:40:15 Who uses Session? 00:45:06 Consensus mechanism for the nodes00:47:31 Why Session decided to fork Monero 00:48:25 Technical challenges in early days building Session 00:49:53 Rewards on the node network 00:52:13 Node economics 00:55:05 Tokenomics over time 00:56:26 Team & contributors 00:57:38 How Session co-founders meet 01:00:55 Business model: Session Pro 01:03:02 Name system & monetization 01:04:27 Scaling challenges 01:07:02 Growth comparison to Web2 messaging apps 01:08:14 Web3 messaging apps' future 01:10:31 Possible future of AI in messaging apps 01:12:57 Kee's advice for Web3 founders01:14:54 Where to follow Session01:16:17 Episode outro and next episode previewFollow Kee and Session:Session Website: https://getsession.org/ Session Twitter/X: https://x.com/session_app Kee's Twitter/X: https://x.com/JefferysKee My social media: Twitter/X: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/LamWeb3⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/lamweb3/⁠Website: ⁠https://lamtrinh.xyz⁠My old article about the 2-3 prevailing narratives of 2024-2025: https://substack.com/home/post/p-143541984 If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to stay updated on our upcoming episodes with industry experts and innovators in the Web3 and Entrepreneurship spaces. Thank you for listening!