Jack Dorsey's payments and technology company Block has launched a new open source, decentralized group chat application built as a direct competitor to Slack — the enterprise messaging platform that has become a fixture of the modern corporate workplace. The move signals that Dorsey, long known for his outspoken allegiance to Bitcoin and decentralized infrastructure, is now extending that philosophy beyond finance and into the very tools businesses use to communicate every day.
The launch is notable not just for its ambition, but for what it represents philosophically. Slack, owned by Salesforce since a $27.7 billion acquisition in 2021, is a deeply centralized product — user data lives on private servers, access is controlled by a corporate intermediary, and the codebase is proprietary. Block's new offering, by contrast, is open source and built on a decentralized architecture, placing it squarely within the same ideological tradition that has driven the broader movement for self-sovereign technology tools.
Dorsey has made no secret of his conviction that centralization — whether in money, identity, or communication — introduces systemic risk and concentrates power in ways that ultimately harm end users. His advocacy for Bitcoin as a neutral monetary network is well-documented, and Block's broader product portfolio, from the Cash App to its hardware Bitcoin wallet, reflects that worldview consistently. A decentralized chat application is, in that context, a logical next step: if you believe financial rails should be open and permissionless, the same argument applies to the communication rails running alongside them.
The enterprise communication market is a significant battleground. Slack commands tens of millions of daily active users across hundreds of thousands of organizations, and competes daily with Microsoft Teams, which benefits from deep integration with the Office 365 ecosystem. Breaking into that market without the gravitational pull of an existing enterprise software suite is genuinely difficult. But open source challengers have managed it before — sometimes by winning the developer community first, then expanding outward. Given that Block's core audience skews heavily technical, that path is plausible.
What decentralization actually means in practice for a group chat tool matters enormously. If Block's application allows organizations or individuals to self-host nodes, store their own message history, and communicate across servers without routing data through a central authority, it would represent a meaningful architectural departure from Slack's model. It would also address legitimate enterprise concerns about data sovereignty — a topic that has grown more acute as governments in Europe and elsewhere have enacted data residency requirements that centralized U.S.-based platforms struggle to satisfy cleanly.
There is also a natural overlap with the Bitcoin and broader crypto-native community, which has long been underserved by mainstream collaboration tools. Projects building on open protocols, managing multi-sig treasuries, or coordinating across pseudonymous contributors have an inherent distrust of platforms that log everything on corporate servers. A credibly open source, decentralized communication layer built by a team with Block's engineering resources and Dorsey's reputational standing in the space would likely find rapid adoption in those circles — providing the kind of early user base that can give a new platform real momentum.
Dorsey's track record in this space is worth examining with clear eyes. His social media platform Bluesky, which launched from an initiative he originally seeded while at Twitter, has made meaningful inroads as an open protocol-based alternative to centralized social media. The AT Protocol underpinning Bluesky is genuinely decentralized in architecture, and the platform has attracted millions of users who wanted an alternative to X. Whether Block's chat application follows a similar trajectory — credible open architecture, real adoption — or remains a niche developer tool will depend on execution, documentation quality, and the network effects it can generate in its first months.
For the enterprise software incumbents, a single open source launch from Block is not an existential threat today. But Dorsey has demonstrated a consistent pattern: seed an open, decentralized alternative to a centralized incumbent, build credibility within technically sophisticated communities, and let the protocol do the long-term work. In money, in social media, and now in workplace communication, the underlying logic is the same. The question is always whether the infrastructure holds up when real organizational scale is applied to it. That test is now beginning.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.