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Web3 CMO Stories
The Peer-to-Peer Revolution with Mathias Buus Madsen, CEO of Holepunch – backed by Tether | S5 E23
The digital landscape is undergoing a profound transformation as privacy awareness grows. What once seemed like a fringe concern has become mainstream, with users increasingly questioning how their data is used and stored. Mathias Buus Madsen, CEO of Holepunch and a leading voice in open source development, stands at the forefront of this shift with a radical vision: eliminating servers entirely.
After more than a decade dedicated to peer-to-peer innovation, Matthias has watched public perception evolve dramatically. "Things were different," he reflects on earlier days when Facebook was continuously growing and privacy concerns were dismissed with "I have nothing to hide." Today's reality looks markedly different, with each passing year bringing greater privacy consciousness—a trend Matthias describes as "bad for the world but very good for peer-to-peer."
Holepunch, backed by Tether, has developed what they call the "Pear Runtime"—a foundation for building applications that operate without servers. Their flagship app Keet demonstrates these principles in action, functioning like Telegram but with a crucial difference: complete decentralization. "If we stop working, the apps will still work," Matthias explains, highlighting the revolutionary independence these applications maintain.
This serverless approach creates extraordinary freedom for developers. Without infrastructure costs to consider, features can be added based purely on their value to users, not their operational expense. The encryption-first design means even the developers themselves can't access user data—sometimes frustrating users accustomed to service recovery, but ultimately providing unprecedented privacy protection.
The intersection of AI with peer-to-peer technology presents particularly fascinating possibilities. While centralized AI models raise serious privacy concerns (who knows what happens to data shared with these systems?), decentralized approaches could empower users to make better decisions without surrendering their personal information. As Matthias puts it, the combination could be "the most exciting almost in human history" or, if hyper-centralized, "the most dystopian and scary thing."
This episode was recorded through a Descript call on May 13, 2025. Read the blog article and show notes here: https://webdrie.net/the-peer-to-peer-revolution-with-mathias-buus-madsen-ceo-of-holepunch-backed-by-tether/
Ready to explore the peer-to-peer revolution? Join the Holepunch community on Discord, explore their open-source repositories on GitHub, or download their applications to experience truly private, resilient technology that works even when the internet doesn't.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Things are different. People have nothing to hide. That was my Facebook, which is getting bigger every year. That has changed now. Every year, people get more privacy focused.
Joeri:Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to be joined by Mathias Buus Madsen. He's the CEO of Holepunch. It's a peer-to-peer company backed by Tether, and he himself is a self-taught JavaScript hacker from Copenhagen and a leading voice in open source. With over 1000 NPM modules and billions of downloads, he's helping developers build serverless apps. We are diving into what that means for future marketing interest online. Hello, Mathias, how are you?
Mathias:I'm good. How are you?
Joeri:I am good excited for this podcast episodes. Mathias, what inspired you to challenge the centralized tech giants and dive into peer-to-peer innovation?
Mathias:sure. Well, I Well, I've been on this journey for many years 10 years. You know what I'm saying Every time I say it. It's been a year more, it's more than 10 years. I've been on this journey for a while, basically reverting computing and the way we build apps back to how it was meant to be. When we first started computing, we kind of lost track as developers about what we were doing. There's been a lot of innovation in the last 10, 20 years. That's pushed tech forward, but also in a dystopian, centralized way. I think everybody who's working with tech or using apps have felt one way or another, and it's only getting worse.
Mathias:From the beginning I got into programming. I'm a programmer by heart. One of the reasons I love programming is because of that extension of my body. I feel when I do programming I can get an idea. I can sit down at my computer and know. With ai stuff it's even easier than ever. I could just produce stuff that has impact, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do programming because of that turnaround. It's just amazing. It feels really like you can have in a short time, a big impact on your world and with open source we can do that even more.
Mathias:I always found this big disconnect between writing code and deploying software. It's been much more centralized. When you make something, you have to spin up tons of servers, infrastructure, get your credit card out and it stops that innovation flow of yours. I've been very triggered by that as a developer and that's one of the reasons I got into peer-to-peer. I caught out all these middlemen, the whole bunch. We've been building on those ideas but tried to put it into much more of a hey, how can we make normal apps that utilize this technology but in a way where they have constable ability, infinite scalability, no operation cost, extension of yourself capabilities? That just allows developers and people to just make cool apps. So that's exciting. We've been doing that for a while now.
Joeri:You have been in stealth mode for about a year. What was the original vision and how did that evolve during the launch?
Mathias:Yeah, sure, so we're open source hackers and we've been working in this space for 10 years, but obviously not working with this exact thing for 10 years, but just with peer-to-peer. That's like deep tech. You have to iterate your code, find the right thing and go through a lot of pain figuring out how to slice that pie. Then, once you get to that, you gotta then figure out. So we have all this technology. We need to make this approachable for people, so you don't need a piece to build with it. It's very easy to make something very complicated, especially when you're deep in it.
Mathias:Applications. You need a lot of stuff. You need scalable file systems so you can share assets like videos, audios, podcasts like this. Again, you want to do it peer-to-peer Create some challenges If you want to store users' data, but again, peer-to-peer, so you want to store it nowhere and everywhere. You want all this to be fully encrypted and secure. There are only peers that work with it can deal with it. When you work with peer-to-peer, you want this to work on devices like computers, phones, watches, whatever. So there's a lot of challenges there because you don't want to run this on just big machines. So we've been just perfecting that and banging out all those modules and, like you said in the beginning, the company made a ton. Finally we brought all that modules and, like you said in the beginning, the company made a ton. Finally we brought all that together.
Mathias:I thought of this thing we call pair runtime, which is our little runtime you can install on some phones and desktops that allow you to build things. We have a chat app called Keet, like Telegram, but fully built on these principles. So no servers. I always say if we stop working, the apps will still work. That's a huge and kind of like work through both the challenges there we see making apps, perfecting that and making that scale and getting people excited about the PHP future.
Joeri:You said lots of things I want to dive into. I know you partnered with Tether and I'm curious how did this partnership fuel your mission? Can you take us inside collaboration and what that means for the?
Mathias:future of decentralized apps.
Mathias:Yeah, I think that's interesting. Working with Paul from Tether for a long time because he's also a very smart guy as well. Anybody who's close to him knows and he's been very interested in peer-to-peer for a very long time. We worked together early on to make peer-to-peer infrastructure that scaled not very public for running various things Modules because of that unstoppability aspect. Anybody who's worked on any big project knows that if you want to make something scale internally, even in a data center, you need the peer-to-peer things that can pop up and help you scale as you move them on, like encryption, defense and depth.
Mathias:When you work with peer-to-peer, you find yourself in this situation. Peer-to-peer by itself is technically really hard, not too much working with peer-to-peer, but implementing it. It's kind of like implementing anything in depth is hard and peer-to-peer has a lot of cryptography, networking stuff to figure out and stuff like that. That's a challenge by itself that takes years out and stuff like that. That's a challenge by itself that takes years. A lot of people would initially say let's do something else, build up a team doing that many years ago. Once you start doing that, you need timing Every time, like 10 years ago when I was working on this, talking to people about peer to peer, they would always say isn't that that file sharing network for illegal movies?
Mathias:I'll be like yeah, but it's much more than that People would immediately go to that and then you would tell them well, it's also really good for privacy. Back then things were different. People were like I have nothing to hide. That wasn't mine. Facebook was just getting bigger every year. That has changed now. That's been a fundamental change. In recent years We've seen people's perception of these things and now it's kind of like going in the opposite direction. Every year people get more privacy-focused. Just think about the last 10 years the big revelations about the surveillance state and all this stuff. That's very good for peer-to-peer.
Mathias:I always say it's bad for the world, but it's very good for peer-to-peer. We make technology to help people sustain their rights and freedoms through technology. The final thing is you need money right, so you need to pay people to work on this. We used to do this to go big and you don't want to compromise the idea of peer-to-peer, which means you don't want to necessarily make a shitcoin. That's encapsulating something, because that's not what peer-to-peer is about. Peer-to-peer is about no middleman. Everybody runs this free infrastructure. It's a different ballgame. Tether is very aligned with us on that mission and that's where that third pillar comes in, which is very exciting for us. Having those three things met for us was I always say, that only happens once in a generation and that's why it's very exciting for us and that's why we're very happy through that partnership, to grow Peer2Peer and bring it to everybody, not just have it be a niche thing.
Joeri:Yeah, also, people see Peer2Peer changing. They start to better understanding it With peers and with kids. You are pushing peer-to-peer apps into the mainstream, but there are still barriers today as a marketer, what can we do to break these barriers?
Mathias:yeah, there's tons of barriers, and it's actually funny you say that because I also think to some degree. Sometimes the barriers can be ourselves. Because it's interesting to work on a piece of technology where I'm so excited about peer-to-peer personally and I can go on lectures talking about all the ways it's technology superior and then we make like a peer-to-peer chat app and at the end of the day people just want something simple. The fact that it's peer-to-peer is cool, but that's just how we can do the stuff that makes it really cool. It's an unlock.
Mathias:Peer-to-peer means we can run it without big, complicated business models because there's no cost to it for us. We can scale it to billions of users at the same cost. We pay developers, but that's a flat cost. We can add features. When somebody in the team comes along and says I want to add this feature, we never think about the cost of that feature because it doesn't cost us anything. So it's all about the product, which is liberating when you make things for users. We can just take feedback. We don't add everything, because we still want the product the way we want it.
Mathias:Also the privacy and surveillance resistance. We don't need a business model that squeezes users. We can actually just make it private and super secure because we don't need to look at data. Sometimes it can even be frustrating for users because we'll still be like, can you help me with this thing? We can't do anything. It's a fully private, entrant encrypted app where we don't store anything. So we're basically just pushing towards. You know, pretty simple make a really solid chat app, but then unlock all the stuff on top that nobody else can, which we're already doing with like files and media and key. We're going to do much more of that.
Mathias:That's the secret sauce Every centralized product. They will capture the market and squeeze the market and at some point they collapse. A new thing comes in, or they can keep bringing people in and it's fine.
Joeri:I was at a conference last week. I spoke. People want to know how they want to use it, what's in it for them. Can you remember a moment when someone finally got what peer-to-peer really means? What did you say to them? What clicked for them?
Mathias:Yeah, I've had many small moments like that. For example, for me personally, the first time it really clicked was when I sent in-laws some money, who live in a faraway country, and it was complicated with the banks. I sent them for Bitcoin and it just worked. What's the magic? And talk about small unlocks? We're actually artificially limited by existing technology. It's not just that we're trying to convince them on a separate path, we're trying to convince them something that's just bigger than what they're doing. Yeah, it can develop into chaos fast when you don't have communications, so it's important to build things from that.
Joeri:The uncertainty right. I rely on the internet, electricity to get some information to understand what is going on. We were supposed to record the podcast and I needed to postpone it. Trust, community all of that really critical. Relying on centralized systems can give you problems.
Mathias:Other lessons you learned around trust and community for decentralized systems Working with free and Bitcoin is a lot of the same learning. You appreciate what I call defense in depth. Even the best system has things to do right now because we have a p2p protocol. It's very resilient, it's open source. Let's add stuff like bluetooth support so people can communicate. You see stuff like that and go to make it stronger, and I think you see stuff like that. I would personally get a bit scared, because what can you do when stuff like that happens If you're cut off from the world? You're cut off from the world and it's very hard to solve. I think it's interesting. You're in Belgium and I'm in Switzerland, which would be very developed places.
Mathias:And people also especially with peer-to-peer, would be like well, you know, internet is always getting better and, like you know, maybe this is only relevant for rural areas and stuff like that. But then it just shows us that the stream of electricity is very centralized. We're very vulnerable when something goes wrong. We need to start thinking as societies much more Absolutely Portugal, where I am now.
Joeri:We are depending there. When I was in Belgium, I had other countries around. Belgium is also dependent on other countries. Let's talk about AI Investing, I think, in AI, peer-to-peer, but where do you personally see biggest opportunities for innovation in the next five years? Ai or maybe something else?
Mathias:I think it's super interesting and a very fast evolving AI. That whole movement is the most exciting almost in human history when combined with a decentralized approach, and I think, if I say it the opposite way, a hyper-centralized approach is the most dystopian and scary thing I can think about. Both parts of the spectrum are hyper. One way or the other, stuff is doing its own thing and we're involved in that process. The stuff they're trying to do, like fusing peer-to-peer technology with models and have a lot of this stuff being runnable on end-user devices, is extremely exciting. For that there are still a lot of technical challenges with making competing things for big centralized models.
Mathias:My one glance of hope I'm by no way an AI researcher, but my hope is that us as humans are pretty decentralized and intelligent to some degree. I'm sure there's a way for technology to move in that way. It seems that nature did it at least. But yeah, so that's the thing we need to do and it's a big part of that, both for data collection and training these networks. Like when I want to pick a new fridge, I go on Google and Google is just feeding me information about the fridge they want me to buy Because of their incentives they probably have some alignment with some deal that they make X amount of money.
Mathias:If I click that link, a proper trained AI model running on the data I gave can give me the best recommendation for the fridge I need, based on my incentives. The price I pay is my data to myself and electricity to run it. As soon as you move that stuff into a more local scale, that's incredibly exciting and it makes me make much better decisions as a human. But as soon as you make it bigger, the incentives get so misaligned that it's impossible to figure out what's going on. I think None of us know what happens with the data we give to OpenAI and stuff.
Joeri:And.
Mathias:I haven't read their terms that clearly, but I'm sure they're clear. They can do whatever they want and give no guarantees. So yeah, it's definitely a crossroads for privacy.
Joeri:Absolutely With everything you give away privacy. Absolutely With everything you give away privacy. Chatgpt now has and other tools. They have the opportunity you give it personal information and your answers are getting better, but you don't know what is happening with it. And then you see other people advising don't give your data to ChatGPT, but of course, then you don't get personal advice. It's a trade-off. If you are mentoring a startup today, how would you advise them about building products for a world without a service.
Mathias:I'm curious. Join those if you're interested in that. My team is in there and we have a lot of the best feeling in the world Coming in at that early stage where people are small and very engaged. That's amazing. We build friendships and great products. Focus on making great apps. Never underestimate how much effort that takes, especially with peer-to-peer. We have a big opportunity to go for something interesting because we can do this no-cost thing. Really killer media products on peer-to-peer.
Mathias:I'm a little bit of an anarchist myself. I always just tell them you know, just burn the to some degree. P2p has interesting business models. We can build on that, but they're not going to be traditional ones like that and so, like anything that's like big media involved and stuff like that, it's like ready for taking. We have a lot of fun internal apps that I won't talk too much about right now, but it showcases that and it's really fun and social.
Mathias:I also think social is a game changer for peer to peer. Peer to peer networks lend themselves well to social interactions because you're connecting more closely to these media. Apps to get more social. One thing I can talk about is a little radio app we use internally at the company where somebody can be the DJ to play music in the office. Peer to peer it's a little social thing where we all get added and pick somebody. You know something that took a couple of guys a day to make and it's really powerful. If you polish that stuff off, you can make really powerful apps that are social and all this stuff.
Joeri:You gave a lot of value in this podcast. We could talk for hours, but if people want to find out more about the project and everything you're working on, where would you like me to send them?
Mathias:So we have a couple of rooms so you can click that has an invite to join the community, and per development, which is two rooms we have. That is exactly around this. We obviously have right now at Twitter where we talk about new things coming out. But go check those things out. Check out the stack githubcom, slash, holepunchto. That has all our open source stuff and we just want to talk to you. We love talking to users, we love understanding, like we talked about in this podcast, in our onboarding flows maybe we can do better. Some ideas participate really heavily with users. When you don't have data collection, the only thing left is actually talking to people, which can be really insightful. We talk to users to understand how we can make the app better, download it, join, talk to us and build apps.
Joeri:Okay, the best ways to join and give feedback. Mathias, as my listeners know, there are always show notes linked to this podcast. All the information you gave will be found there. People will always find a way to reach out to you. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mathias:You too, man, thank you.
Joeri:What an amazing episode. If you learned something new and think this is useful for people around you, be sure to share this episode with them. If you are not yet following the show, this is a good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this would help me reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.
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