The Future of Session

The Future of Session<br>June 15, 2026 / Session<br>Earlier this year, the Session Technology Foundation (STF) had to pause Session development due to financial constraints. After a donation campaign in which many users, friends, and peers gave to the Foundation, the STF now has enough resources to continue Session development in some capacity.<br>This post aims to provide some context about the Foundation’s standing before and after the campaign, highlight the figures who will lead Session from now on, and outline their development strategy.<br>However, first we want to express our immense gratitude to all the people who gave . If it wasn’t for your help, the STF would be winding down support for Session — meaning there would be no more updates, apps would be de-listed from stores, and certain network infrastructure would go offline. Although the decentralized network can continue without the STF, the future of the ecosystem was quite uncertain. There is now a way forward because of the community’s generosity, and Session can continue to provide private, safe, and secure messaging for its millions of users.<br>Foundation resourcing<br>In the past, the Session Technology Foundation supported a relatively large development team, as well as staff for some operations, communications, and policy functions. Although the spend for these contributors was modest compared to the typical size and cost of teams creating messaging apps, people were still the most expensive part of supporting Session.<br>This team was maintained as long as possible in order to try and keep pace with other apps in the messaging class, assure the strongest possible security and privacy, and to attempt to develop value-generating features pursuant to the sustainability of the Foundation, node operation, and the overall ecosystem.<br>Our strategy was to work towards the release of the Session Pro Beta, believing this would begin providing the Foundation and ecosystem with the stimulus required to continue. Of course, privacy preservation, feature value and reliability, and decentralization were considerations, and the development work was significant. By the time this work was complete–or close to complete–the Foundation was forced to assess whether a Pro Beta release was responsible given its current position. In simple terms, as it stood the Foundation did not have the resources to continue developing Pro features or provide ongoing support to purchasers. Launching Session Pro Beta at that time would have been a huge gamble, and launching did not meet the Foundation’s integrity standards due to this risk to users.<br>With low revenue and a dwindling treasury, the Foundation made the decision to reduce its costs as close to zero as possible, which sadly meant losing all employees — the people whose work lives were dedicated to Session. Some continued as volunteers, and during this time there were three main activities: tracking community contributions and planning for how to use these funds, holding conversations with several parties interested in commercial deals relating to Session, and seeking grants and public funding which may support Session’s development.<br>Since launching the campaign, the Foundation has received a steady stream of donations from the community. These have mostly been small donations from everyday people who want to see Session live on. Some volunteer contributors started making plans for how these funds could be used (these plans can be read below).<br>At the same time, several individuals reached out to the Foundation to inquire about commercial deals. These ranged from proposals for white-labelled enterprise versions of Session, acquisition of the Session IP and transition of stewardship, folding Session into new or pre-existing projects, and general expressions of interest. As you can probably imagine, some of these approaches were extremely suspicious or simply technically and philosophically infeasible, while a smaller amount were good faith ideas from supportive and generous people. Unfortunately, none of these opportunities were compatible with the Session project for various reasons. That being said, contributors remain very open to the possibility of enterprise versions of Session in the future, however, it is paramount that this does not bring detriment or compromise to the free and public version of Session.<br>And finally, there is also ongoing effort to work with grants and public funding which supports free and open source technology like Session. These processes generally take some time, so there are not yet results from these efforts (and none can be counted on for the time being, though we are quite hopeful that at least some will come through).<br>For now, the Foundation is running on community contributions alone. The incredible amount of support we have received is greatly appreciated, and it will support the small team working on Session going forward.<br>Session’s second wave<br>In the short term, Session is...