In July 2025, the digital communication landscape underwent a fundamental shift when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block, Inc., unveiled his latest project, Bitchat. This decentralized, peer-to-peer free messaging application represents the culmination of Dorsey’s long-standing fascination with censorship-resistant protocols and his vocal advocacy for digital sovereignty.

Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Kazakh computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan, represents one of the most radical and impactful movements in the history of academic publishing. Created out of frustration with the high costs of accessing scholarly literature, Sci-Hub became the world’s largest open-access “shadow library” until today, offering free access to tens of millions of research papers that would otherwise be locked behind expensive paywalls.