Almost everything Brazilians say to each other runs through WhatsApp, Instagram and X. All three are American companies under American law. The government's answer so far is a closed messenger for its own staff. Nobody offers ordinary people a messenger that is hosted in Brazil, open, and owned by no single party.
Bipe is our attempt. It is a messenger in the style of WhatsApp, with its own apps for iPhone and Android, built on the open Matrix protocol. Envisioning builds the apps and runs the servers in Brazil today, and the code has been public since October 2026.
The longer plan matters more than the app. We want Bipe to become shared infrastructure: an association of member organizations and users runs the core, every verified user gets a vote, and other organizations can run servers for their own people. Nobody, including us, should be able to change the rules alone.
I don't expect Bipe to beat WhatsApp, and that is not the goal. People will not switch because of an abstract word like sovereignty. They come for things WhatsApp will not do: no advertising profile, free verified identity so nobody can impersonate you, and Pix payments built in. Or they come all at once, the day WhatsApp has an outage or a policy shock, or because a group they belong to moved.
So success means something simpler: staying alive, staying trustworthy, and being ready when people need a way out. It is an old hacker idea. Run your own infrastructure, in the open, and make sure nobody owns it.
Try it at bipe.chat.
