January 30th 2025
On January 30th, the OpenChat team hosted the first edition of the OpenChat Townhall, simulcast on both OpenChat and YouTube. During this event, the team presented new and upcoming features, shared OpenChat’s long-term vision, and explored exciting developments in the AI space. Additionally, I had the opportunity to participate in the livestream, providing an in-depth explanation of key data points from Token Terminal.
The event was hosted by Jesse Friedman, who recently joined the OpenChat team this month. Jesse is now responsible for product and marketing strategy, as well as the overall promotion of OpenChat.
The first speaker was Matthew Grogan, co-founder of OpenChat and a software developer. Grogan has a long history in the industry, having worked with Dominic Williams (the founder of DFINITY, which builds the Internet Computer blockchain) as a developer since the late ’90s and throughout the 2000s in various software ventures.
Matt began by introducing a newly implemented OpenChat feature: Verified Communities and Groups. This feature allows representatives of public communities or groups to submit proposals for verification. If approved, the community receives a blue checkmark, helping to prevent fraud.
For example, a community named “DFINITY” that is not managed by DFINITY could be misleading. With this feature, DFINITY could submit a proposal to reclaim the name. It is also important to note that the verified status can be revoked through a proposal, and if a verified community or group changes its name, it automatically loses its verified status.
The next speaker was Ivan Jukic, an accomplished full-stack developer with prior collaboration experience with the OpenChat dev team. Ivan joined the OpenChat team in January of this year, bringing his expertise to strengthen the platform’s technical foundations.During the Townhall, Ivan introduced the new “Quick Reactions” feature. With extensive experience using platforms like Slack and Discord, he proposed implementing this functionality, which has now been successfully added.
When a user presses on a message, the Quick Reactions menu appears, divided into two sections. Users can either select from three predetermined reactions (based on their most-used emojis) or choose specific reactions manually. Additionally, if a user frequently uses a particular reaction, it will automatically replace one of the preset reactions.
Beyond reactions, this feature also allows users to quickly reply in threads or quote messages. Currently, Quick Reactions is available only on the desktop version, with plans to introduce a similar feature for mobile. In the future, users will also be able to customize their Quick Reactions menu for a more personalized experience.
The next speaker was Hamish Peebles, developer and co-founder of OpenChat. Hamish introduced a new feature aimed at enhancing the platform’s scalability and performance while optimizing costs for OpenChat.
He explained that canisters have two types of memory: heap memory and stable memory. With over 200,000 canisters in use, storing large datasets directly in stable memory significantly reduces costs. As a result, upgrades are now much faster and cheaper.
This improvement also eliminates the previous 4GB heap memory limit, as stable memory can grow to hundreds of gigabytes. This breakthrough allows OpenChat to support massive communities with potentially millions of members.
These optimizations have led to a 15x cost reduction for the largest OpenChat community—OpenChat itself. On average, upgrade costs have decreased by a factor of 5x. As Hamish stated: “Going forward, this means that OpenChat is cheap to run and we can scale to huge communities.”
The OpenChat team would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the wider ICP community 📉
We have made so many optimisations to OpenChat, it now only burns a fraction of the cycles when performing upgrades.
For example, upgrading our largest community now requires 50B…
— OpenChat ∞ (@OpenChat) December 13, 2024
Next, Jesse announced a short dancing break, during which he played a clip from the DAO-LIDAY Party, an event presented by OpenChat. This event took place on December 18th of last year.
Next, Matt and Julian Jelfs, a Software Engineer who joined OpenChat in 2021, introduced a game-changing feature: OpenChat Bots. The OpenChat team has worked diligently for a long time to bring this powerful new functionality to life.
A bot is essentially a server component. It can be a canister if built as an on-chain bot or any other type of server if built as an off-chain bot. The OpenChat team anticipates that developers will want to create both types. In general, a bot operates outside OpenChat but communicates with the platform.
Julian presented three different types of bots:
- Command Bots – These are triggered by an OpenChat user initiating an interaction.
- Integration Bots – These are activated by an external system rather than an OpenChat user.
- Autonomous Bots – These operate independently without external triggers, deciding on their own when to interact with the OpenChat backend (e.g., an AI agent).
These categories describe different bot behaviors, but a single bot could incorporate all three functionalities.
Next, Julian presented a demo of OpenChat Bots.
Following an insightful presentation on the potential use cases of OpenChat Bots, Jesse introduced the “OpenChat Bothathon,” a competition running throughout March. Developers will compete to create and deploy the most innovative and creative bots, with the grand prize winner receiving $50K in CHAT tokens.
Participants will compete across five categories:
- Fun & Entertainment
- Social & Community
- DEX & Trading
- Utility & Productivity
- AI Agents
In addition to category winners, judges will also award three grand prizes:
- Best of Show
- Community Choice Award
- OC Devs’ Favorite Award
The entire event will be hosted on OpenChat, where participants will join the OpenChat Bot Community, engage in live-streamed bot testing, and collaborate with fellow developers. Competitors will also have access to volunteer mentors, developer support, custom documentation resources, and more.
OpenChat is partnering with ICP Hub Hong Kong to enhance community outreach and marketing for the event.
For more details, join the OpenChat Bothathon Community!
Next, I had the honor of analyzing and explaining the latest data, charts, metrics, and indicators provided by Token Terminal. Since the beginning of January 2024, OpenChat has seen significant development, growth, and adoption—and the data confirms it!
Here are some of the key metrics:
- Monthly active users: +1,540%
- Daily active users: +935%
- Daily user online time: +880%
- Daily CHIT claim count: +773%
- Daily message count: +300%
- Daily message reaction count: +138%
- User registration count: +82%
These data points highlight OpenChat’s rapid expansion and increasing engagement within the community!
Following my presentation of the most relevant data points, the team addressed audience questions and shared additional insights into the features currently in development and planned for future release.
Julian emphasized that the primary focus right now is on Bots. Hamish provided a timeline for End-to-End (E2E) encryption, explaining that its implementation depends on vetkeys. Once vetkeys are in place, E2E encryption will first be rolled out for direct chats, followed by group chats, with an estimated timeline of 3-6 months, though this could extend based on the vetkeys’ implementation.
Matt then revealed ongoing work on profile pages, which will feature a user post feed. Other users will be able to subscribe to these feeds, similar to how followers engage on X (formerly Twitter).
Community Q&A
Q: Can OpenChat integrate a DeepSeek chatbot?
A: Yes, this is absolutely possible.
Q: Is it possible to forward multiple messages at once, like an entire conversation?
A: Yes, this is technically feasible. It hasn’t been implemented yet as we initially considered it a niche feature, but it can be added.
Q: Can we have a bot that displays crypto prices?
A: Yes! This is actually one of the first bots we plan to implement. We have already reached out to Alpaca Labs, who created the Alpaca Price Bot on Telegram, and they responded enthusiastically:
“We have been waiting!”
So yes, this feature is coming soon.
Q: Will OpenChat introduce voice chat channels and community features similar to Discord?
A: Yes, this is something we could develop. It would require additional work on the video UI, but it is definitely possible.
Conclusion
The first edition of the OpenChat Town Hall was a great success, and I’m looking forward to the next one!
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