Quoting their docs: Kryfo: "you are a key pair generated on your device. nobody, including us, can look you up or tie your chats to a real identity." - so there is identity, it's a key. Night Drop: "Your identity is a keypair held on your device." Bitchat - user identity is the hash of public key. Briar - it has Briar ID, which is also a cryptographic identity of the user. So all these and other apps have pseudonymous user identities, not "no user identity". The problem with pseudonymous identities is that they can be de-anonymised with LLMs by comparing observable [parts of] connection graphs with public connection graphs (X, Facebook, etc.). There is a relevant research from 2009 about deanonymizing social networks where users are pseudonymous: arxiv.org/abs/0903.3276 It was quite successful then, and it's much easier now, as participation in social networks in much wider, and LLMs are cheap. The difference of SimpleX Network from all pseudonymous (aka anonymous) messengers and networks, is that it has no concept of user identity at all - there is nothing that identifies a user to the network - not a key, hash, or some random number. There are addresses and there will be public names soon, but they exist as opt-in layer for those who want to be discovered, and in any case they are not used to deliver messages - they are only optional rendezvous points. Instead, SimpleX Network uses pairwise connection identifiers with anonymous per-connection credentials. So network servers can observe which connections exist, but not which (or even how many) users exist. Our knowledge of active users is from App Store and Play Store data, and from download statistics of the app. And even on the transport level - network servers can observe user IP addresses (same as Tor entry nodes can), but not which IP address talks to which IP address. You can look at a simplified vizualization of how SimpleX works here: simplex.chat/messaging/#simp… (in reality there are two independent servers in message delivery path) So if you talk to 2 people in SimpleX, they have no simple way to prove you are actually the same user, because there is no correlation between your connections on metadata level, other than by time or writing style. So "the only messaging network without any user identifiers" is not just marketing, it's a fact.

Our prediction is that anything that uses phone numbers will be unsafe for general public, because phone numbers could become trivially cheap to fake within years - so you simply won't know who you talk to. With Signal, there are 3 points where a phone number can be faked: - phone company, - Signal itself, - Twilio that is used to deliver verification SMSs - and Signal phone verification was already compromised before via Twilio The same is likely to happen with email addresses, this happened just yesterday: xitter.cf/IntCyberDigest/status/… The design of SimpleX Network mitigates this risk by moving trust to connection authenticity from servers to cryptography and users' devices, making it much harder to compromise at scale. So it's not only the question of privacy, but also about trust - so you know that you talk to a person you know, and not to AI clone.