A new, decentralized internet browser built on Bitcoin called Impervious was officially announced at Bitcoin 2022 following an on-stage announcement by the CEO of Impervious AI, Chase Perkins.
“We have become, not even in essence, but quite literally, subjects of digital tyranny,” Perkins said as he took the stage. Referring to the big tech companies that control, sell and track all of our data, forcing the users into becoming the products being sold.
“Zoom without Zoom. Publishing without publishers. Payments without banks,” Perkins explained, allowing Impervious to remove manipulative intermediaries seeking to commoditize personal information.
Impervious is a programmatic layer, meaning developers can write programs on top of it, with Bitcoin serving as the foundation upon which all else is built. But Bitcoin moves slowly and developers need quicker data transmission to make a functional browser.
“You’re connecting peer to peer, over the Lightning network,” said Perkins as he demonstrated the speed of the browser in a live demo where he connected with his lead engineer in seconds, for 15 sats.
As a Layer 2 protocol for Bitcoin, the Lightning Network allows two or more peer-to-peer connections to create as many transactions as they want without having to communicate to the base layer of Bitcoin until a final balance needs to be settled. This allows for quicker and cheaper transactions.
“This is the first Lightning-native web browser,” Perkins explained as the crowd cheered at this notable achievement. This integration allows users to truly connect to each other, without tedious connectors looking to take a profit.
Impervious looks to remove the digital intermediaries and give its users a truly decentralized experience, absent censorship, that actively combats surveillance. All of this is accomplished with the decentralized, hard-money layer foundation of Bitcoin. Perkins detailed his outlook to the future for Impervious AI.
“We’ve only been working on the browser for six months. This is only the beginning,” he said. He continued later, “Let’s regain our digital dignity and normalize the peer to peer internet standard.”
Bitcoin 2022 is part of the Bitcoin Event Series hosted by BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine.