PeakD Chat is a Hive dapp that allows Hive users to securely communicate with each other without the need to publish anything on the Hive blockchain or use a third-party communications platform. Its original name is "PeakD Sting Chat".
Primary features
These are many of the important features of #PeakD Chat not available (yet) on other Hive chat dapps.
- End-to-end encrypted one-on-one and group chats. Text and images can be sent as messages. Any message from one Hive account to another Hive account or group chat is both encrypted and signed by the posting key of the sender. Nothing gets published on the Hive blockchain when chatting this way.
- Community chats. A Hive user can send a message on any Hive public community channel, whether or not the Hive account of the user has subscribed to the community on the blockchain. Messages are signed by the sender's posting key, such that everyone else can verify that the sender is the owner (or at least has access to the private posting key). Like on one-on-one and group chats, text and images can be sent as messages. Unless any user wants to upvote a message (which is different from simply reacting with emojis) or a community admin wants to assign roles to users, nothing also gets published on the Hive blockchain. Each Hive community has a #General channel by default on PeakD Chat.
- Curation support. A message on a Hive community channel can be upvoted by any other PeakD Chat user, where the message of the recipient of the vote will first be published using the voter's Hive account as a comment under the Peak Open Chat post (or another similar post) where the 100% beneficiary of rewards is the user to be upvoted, then Hive Keychain will make the voter upvote such comment.
- Notifications. PeakD Chat notifies the user inside the dapp whenever someone messages them directly (on one-on-one chats) or replies under their message on any Hive community channel they follow in-app (whether or not the user is subscribed to the community on the Hive blockchain).
- PeakD blogging frontend integration. PeakD Chat is also integrated on the PeakD blogging frontend, so PeakD Chat users can get notified and send messages right on the main PeakD blogging interface when logged in.
- Guest accounts. Anyone who does not have a Hive account or does not want to use his/her own Hive account can login as guest (with an auto-generated username). However, it will not be possible to reenter the same chat with the same username after the session ends.
- Personalization settings. Every user can set his/her own preferences, themes, and fonts of their PeakD Chat client interface.
Primary drawbacks
Listed here are some of the most noticeable drawbacks when using PeakD Chat. This would also serve as a suggestion to implement new features and/or fix issues.
- No call support. Voice (and video) calls are not (yet) supported. It is normally a huge challenge for developers to support calling on a decentralized app even for one-on-one communication, not to mention group calls.
- Noticeable decryption time on one-on-one chats. Because one-on-one chats are end-to-end encrypted, Hive Keychain and PeakD Chat together must decrypt each message so that the user can read the messages (at a rate of roughly 15 messages per second). This happens every time the chat page is reloaded.
 | The PeakD logo as it appears on the PeakD Chat landing page to serve as cover image  |
Other information
- PeakD Chat is Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), and its source code (frontend and backend) are available on PeakD's GitLab repository.
- The #DBuzz team has a fork of PeakD chat running at https://chat.d.buzz/ which is working (with only a few technical issues).
- The author of this post can be messaged on PeakD Chat at https://chat.peakd.com/p/savvyplayer. Please expect your message to be read.
- Tagging most Hive users who recently replied (within the past 7 days) under the author's previous posts. @rzc24-nftbbg @pepetoken @kenny-crane @jmis101 @astym @iceledy @caelum1infernum @astramar @svanbo @slothlydoesit @tydynrain @borniet @crrdlx @atma.love