Blockchain Is Not a Cure-All for Every Video Conferencing Flaw

With the coronavirus pandemic forcing many businesses to adopt work-from-home policies, the demand for video conferencing programs appears to have increased.

Blockchain projects are now getting into the video conferencing arena, looking to leverage the novel tech for providing more robust privacy and security features.

Governments of different countries effectively closed down their economies, meaning workers have had to perform their duties from home and video conferencing programs like Zoom soon shot up in popularity.

Zoom's position in the emerging video conference ecosystem may be increasingly under threat with the likes of Facebook and Google making upgrades to their video chatting platforms.

Enter blockchain-based solutionsWith centralized video conferencing solutions proving to have significant security and privacy vulnerabilities, perhaps the stage is set for blockchain-based projects to leverage the novel tech in providing safer virtual video chatting platforms.

Commenting on the suitability of blockchain-based video conferencing apps, Reuben Yap, project steward at Zcoin, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, told Cointelegraph that the novel tech will not do much in mitigating the vulnerabilities seen in the likes of Zoom:."Blockchain's main benefit is that there's no central authority but alone, it does nothing to secure communications which is the main issue that Zoom is facing. You don't really need immutability either in communications and in most cases this is an undesirable thing. The key issues are scalable end to end encryption but perhaps more importantly, implementations that are designed with security in mind but remain easy to use."

The social media decentralization dreamBrave's video conferencing feature announcement came amid a flurry of developments concerning crypto and blockchain projects involved in social media applications.

With incentivized blockchain social media platforms emerging, there seems to be a push toward decentralizing the social media space.

"A big issue is also making a tokenomics model that makes sense. Most of the current social media platforms on blockchain have their own token which can be used to tip and pay for things but many also give power to these tokens to upvote and increase visibility of posts. This actually can create a sort of oligopoly where early large holders have a disproportionate say in what content is displayed which may limit the growth of the platform. Despite the challenges, I am pretty excited at seeing blockchain power social media done right."

Some of the support for the development of blockchain social media is due to the apparent censorship seen in centralized platforms.