SimpleX Community Vouchers

Since we started developing the SimpleX network, the app has been downloaded over 1.5 million times.

We are not just building a messenger. Unlike today's web dominated by big tech platforms, SimpleX is a network where you fully control your online identity, contacts, groups, and content – without ads tracking you or companies mining your data.

The SimpleX network is designed to be private, secure, decentralized (meaning no single company owns it), and truly owned by its users. That's why we develop it as fully open-source code (anyone can review it or build their own apps and servers).

To make this vision sustainable, we're introducing Community Vouchers in 2026. Think of them as simple prepaid cards for phone calls, but for funding the servers that power your channels and groups.

How it will work in simple terms:

Under the hood, Community Vouchers are utility tokens on a blockchain (a secure, shared ledger that no single company controls). But you won't have to use blockchain if you don't want to: we are making vouchers as easy to use as gift cards.

Community Vouchers are not tradable, and there will be no "pre-mine" or public sale.

If you have a cryptowallet, and want to test Community Vouchers early, before full release, you can get a free access pass to the test version — a free non-transferrable NFT on Ethereum mainnet, you only need to pay for gas.

To receive updates, connect to us via SimpleX Chat.

Community Vouchers FAQ — send your feedback

These are early insights into how Community Vouchers can work — some of these ideas are still vague; they will evolve based on your feedback and testing.

Why Community Vouchers?

To cover server costs securely and privately.

With "free" centralized platforms:

Paying for server capacity may be cheaper than "free" platforms. Our estimates based on the current costs are $5-10/month for 5,000 active message receivers (could be up to 50,000 listed community members) with 5-10 GB of files/media archive. These estimates are preliminary and may change.

Free Tier?

It will be determined after testing. Preliminarily, we expect up to 1,000 active message receivers (can be up to 10,000 listed members) and 500 MB storage to be available for free groups.

"Active message recipient" in this model is a group member who periodically connects to the network, and receives group messages. Members who are listed but don't open the group for some time, for example two weeks, will stop receiving all group messages even when they are connected to the network. This is an evolving design that will balance security for group members and owners, to avoid inflated expenses, and to present realistic membership statistics to the group owners and to prospective members.

Private messaging with contacts and in private groups within "fair use" limits that we apply today will remain free:

Larger limits may be offered in paid tier, but it is not planned initially — the focus of Community Vouchers is to create a commercial model for communities.

How Will Vouchers Work?

Buy via app (like phone top-ups), with unused capacity shown in the app. An important design goal is to make Community Vouchers available to people who don't use any cryptocurrencies.

Testnet is likely to use hashed IDs for privacy and on-chain payments, to validate the pricing and economic model. Zero-knowledge proofs and in-app payments will be added by the time production network is launched.

Will self-hosted servers still be supported by SimpleX network?

Yes, absolutely. Not only will the apps continue to support self-hosted servers, but we will improve it. We see network decentralization and server portability as very important, and while we need to develop a robust commercial model for the servers, we still need community-hosted servers to function, with all people using a single network:

What problems Community Vouchers solve that other payment methods can't?

Community Vouchers implemented via smart contracts on blockchain solve these problems:

How is it possible to provide privacy on public blockchain?

In the same way it is possible to provide private communications on the public Internet, as SimpleX network does.

Our commitment to users' privacy and security remains as strong as ever, and we plan to bring the practical expertise of building private communication protocols over the last 5 years to how we develop the technology for the blockchain.

While specific designs are in early stages, here are some of the principles that we will follow to ensure privacy:

We will be publishing the whitepaper about this design. It will provide an unprecedented level of security and privacy for blockchain applications, irrespective of which chain we choose to use.

Will Community Vouchers be pre-sold via private or public sale?

There will be no Community Vouchers pre-sold or in any other way made available to the team, or to investors or to the public.

Any blockchain token that is pre-sold to raise funds to develop technology is not a utility token, regardless of how it's named — it becomes an investment contract that passes Howey test.

This is not what we are doing. Community Vouchers are restricted utility tokens, not an investment contract. They will be only issued on demand to people who want to pay for network servers, at a fixed price.

Who will sell vouchers?

Initially, Community Vouchers will be sold via a smart contract in exchange for some other tradeable tokens, most likely stablecoins. We don't plan any token emission, or any public or private pre-sales. And we won't have access to the funds from voucher sales — they will be locked in a smart contract, and only released once servers have provided capacity to the users, with the funds shared between server operators and the SimpleX network, with operators receiving up to 60%, depending on trust evaluation. The SimpleX network funds will be managed by smart contracts, and will be used for governance and development as defined by the contracts. Their price will be fixed based on server costs, with the exact economic model developed during the testing phase.

How the server operator revenue share is determined?

It will be based on the goal that servers must provide both reliability and security to the users. Security in any multi-node network depends on users' ability to choose independent servers that are provided by different entities, and the apps are already programmed not just to use different servers for the message delivery path, but to use servers of different operators. Even though currently there are only 2 preset operators — SimpleX Chat and Flux — and all servers added to the app by the user are considered a third operator, it substantially improves privacy and security.

In the future, the operators that confirmed their identity to the network will receive a much higher revenue share than anonymous ones. We believe that for users to be private and secure, operators must be known, and must accept legally binding terms of operation, same as preset operators do today.

The other two factors that will affect "trust evaluation" will be how long the operator was available on the network and servers' availability uptime. Similar to how we monitor the uptime of our servers, the network will monitor the uptime of all servers, and it will affect the revenue share.

We don't have an exact model for revenue sharing yet; it will be determined during testing and will evolve based on feedback from users and server operators.

Who will control and upgrade smart contracts?

Community Vouchers will require several smart contracts for their functioning. During testing and development, SimpleX Chat will maintain and update all contracts. Once the network is ready for production, some critical contracts (e.g., those that control the funds) will be immutable, requiring a lot of testing and a security audit, and some less critical contracts will still be upgradeable based on a consensus model (e.g., multisig or voting).

It is always a journey from knowing that something is possible to knowing how exactly it will be done, and we are at the early stage of knowing it is possible. Specific designs would evolve, based on the input from legal and blockchain experts, and from the community — as everything else we develop for SimpleX network.

Will I be able to sell or transfer Community Vouchers to other people?

Possibly, but with limits on the number of transactions and the time of holding.

Community Vouchers are designed with a single purpose — to facilitate payments for servers' capacity in a way that protects users' security. Smart contracts implementing them will restrict or completely prohibit trading. The specific parameters will be determined during design evolution and testing.

Why Not Existing Crypto?

Existing cryptocurrencies do not allow the implementation of the required model for Community Vouchers. The price of cryptocurrencies is determined speculatively, and not based on costs. The fact that they can be freely traded and transferred exposes existing cryptocurrencies and tokens to financial regulations.

The existing cryptocurrencies such as XMR, BTC and some others will be accepted as payment for Community Vouchers, via bridges, but they cannot be used in the foundation of the system, because they are not as flexible as smart contracts, and cannot directly support the model we are developing.

Why build on Ethereum blockchain?

Many people dislike Ethereum for its high energy usage and high transaction costs in the past. Also, blockchain transactions cannot provide privacy, can they? Why not use Monero (XMR) instead?

This was our assessment as well in the past. But the last three years changed it, addressing energy usage and transaction costs, and we've seen the growth of several L2 Ethereum blockchains. What made us decide that EVM-based blockchain is the best choice for the current stage is the planned rollout of zkEVM in 2025 with native support for zero-knowledge proofs.

Our early ideas about Community Vouchers and the most recent design rely on zero-knowledge proofs, and as it will be natively supported, EVM blockchains provide a much better foundation to build Community Vouchers than building them from scratch — there is no need to re-invent solutions to problems that are already solved.

Have you considered other blockchains?

We are actively considering which blockchain to build on. Ethereum ecosystem is the most widely adopted, and has very mature systems and tools, and it appears sufficient, but it has its downsides, as does everything. So we are not yet committed to Ethereum.

Which token specification do you plan to use?

Even though these are not freely tradable tokens, we will likely make them compatible with ERC20 token specification. It is very simple, one of the earliest, and the most adopted standard on EVM blockchain. It defines tokens, but they don't have to be freely tradeable — the specification allows any extensions and restrictions implemented on top of it.

Using this specification would make Community Vouchers partially compatible with wallets and chain explorers, making testing, development, and early adoption easier.

If you build on another blockchain, how the NFT will be used to provide access?

We can take into account the list of addresses that hold NFTs and provide access to testnet on any blockchain via a cryptographic signature. That is the reason the NFT is deployed on Ethereum mainnet and not on some of L2 chains. We don't yet know at this stage which L2 testnet will be used.

Disclaimer

This design is evolving — please share your feedback.

This is not an investment offer. All details are subject to legal review.

logo
About & Contact us Privacy Policy Join team Donate
SimpleX Whitepaper SimpleX Chat protocol Terminal CLI SimpleX bots API
© 2020-2025 SimpleX Chat | Open-Source Project