There are many people who use Signal as their instant messenger, but it's centralised and requires a phone number to use. Loki is attempting to fix that by bringing forward a new messenger called Session.
What is Loki?
Loki is a relatively new block-chain project and cryptocurrency. It features many features similar to Monero and more, including the ability to function as a decentralised backbone for different programmes.
Loki's all time high as of writing is $1.21, being reached on September 3rd, it's currently around a third of that. Might be a good time to buy some if you think the tech is promising.
What makes Loki different from other cryptocurrencies?
Loki's node network is capable of arbitrarily transferring data for applications, this has already been used to build two major applications: Session and Lokinet.
This give Loki a technical advantage over many other cryptocurrencies, as it can be used to build truly decentralised applications.
Session
Session is a fork of Signal, it's aiming to be more secure and private than Signal could ever be with its current model.
While new and still a bit clunky, it works quite well for being beta software. It's built on top of Lokinet. This means it's also near impossible for a government to shut down, at least not without taking out a major chunk of the internet along with it.
You can head over to https://getsession.org/ to download it, do keep in mind that there is currently no multi-device support as it was disabled for being too buggy. From what I can gather, they'll begin working on bringing it back once they can get the single device experience polished.
Lokinet
Lokinet is an onion routing network, not unlike that of Tor. It can be used to build fully decentralised apps such as Session and it runs on top of Loki's blockchain network.
To my knowledge, there's not all that much to show off regarding Lokinet yet besides Session and the Lokinet browser, you can look at the Lokinet website for more info.
Loki is a promising new technology and has the potential to overtake Monero. For now though, Monero holds king when it comes to privacy currencies.
Be sure to leave your thoughts below, I'd like to know what everyone else here thinks about this new crypto technology.