Germ Network

We had the best night celebrating Pride with the smartest and sweetest community in Silicon Valley. Thank you to Heavybit, Generationship, and Bluesky Social for helping us throw down for our people. This feels like the beginning of a beautiful tradition. See you next year, El Rio?

Save the date: celebrate Pride with Germ! Join us on Thursday, June 25 from 5-8 at iconic SF queer bar El Rio. Germ is queer-led (hi from our CEO Tessa) with several queer team members, and we know our LGBTQIA2S+ community values how Germ DM lets you chat as all your different selves. Come celebrate with our partners Bluesky Social, Heavybit, and Generationship, and meet other Bay Area locals who care about privacy, boundaries, and (of course) great music. RSVP at the link in comments, and see you there!

A Germ first: our iconic green cap is now digital. Two weeks ago, we dropped the Germ DM cap on rpg.actor — and it's been the most-worn item on the gaming platform ever since. The makers of rpg.actor hit us up about releasing a digital version of our sold-out cap to our community. We designed a digital version to be claimed by players who follow us and are registered Germ users via their publicly-indexable AT Protocol records. If you’re new here: Germ DM is a totally private, end-to-end encrypted messenger with no phone numbers required. Since our Bluesky Social integration launched in February, about an app a week built on the AT Protocol—including alternative Bluesky tools Blacksky Algorithms and Skeets, photos app Grain, media tracking app Popfeed and more—have linked directly to Germ to offer seamless, private DMs to their users. But this digital drop has a special place in our hearts. Check out the rpg.actor homepage to see characters in their green Germ hats chilling on screen. Want to spot the Germ cap IRL? Join our newsletter in the comments for first RSVP to our upcoming Pride Party in San Francisco.

Can we protocolize consent? At Germ, we think so. Consent bridges contract law, digital rights, and sexual health. But in software, it shows up in shallow and irritating ways, as a splash page or pop-up keeping us from where we’re trying to go. Real consent is much richer—it’s the foundation of healthy connections and even societies built on trust, mutuality, and evolution. For too long, privacy software has overlooked consent. That’s why many of the best-in-class private messengers made early choices like sending notifications to everyone in your phone contacts, or waiting until recently to help you obscure your phone number or share different display names with different groups of friends. And while common wisdom is that young people and especially young women don’t care about privacy, Germ’s over 200 user interviews suggest that they care deeply. Not about abstract threats from Big Brother, but about controlling what they share in their interpersonal relationships. That’s why young people today are managing instas, finstas, Snaps, LinkedIns, and even Google Voice numbers. They’re hacking single-identity systems because they refuse to share everything with everyone, all the time. At Atmosphere Conference 2026, the gathering for developers on AT Protocol, the open-social layer powering Bluesky and 1000s of other apps, I went deep on consent and how Germ Network’s Autonomous Communicator Protocol lifts secure messaging off of phone numbers for more flexible consensual connections. Can you imagine a future where you were never afraid to give your phone number to someone? Where a young woman or queer person didn’t have to be afraid of sharing their contact with the wrong person at a party, or a salesperson sharing their contact in an email footer didn’t have to answer every single spam call that came in? This world is possible when we build consent into the technology that connects us. Because that’s the truth about consent the haters don’t want us to know: when we seize the power to say no, it becomes so much more fun to say yes. Watch and read my full keynote, “Consent Before Cryptography,” linked in the comments.

Germ DM 3.0.4 Is Live! 🌱📲 Our newest updates make it easier to get started and pick up where you left off. We also narrowed the permissions we request when interacting with your Atmosphere (Bluesky) account so that we’re requesting only the information we need, preserving our commitment to your privacy. After some deep backend work to make sure that users from Bluesky Social and across their 43M-user AT Protocol ecosystem can log into Germ, we’re excited to be working on some new features. Stay tuned! Many thanks also to 👸🏻 Emelia S. for her contributions to this work. You can read more about our OAuth work in Germ CTO Mark Xue’s blog post, linked in the comments.

ATmosphere Conf ’26 in Vancouver is a wrap! Germ’s CEO and co-founder Tessa Brown and Founding Engineer Anna M. headed to Vancouver at the end of March to talk shop with the fellow builders behind the 1000+ products built on the AT Protocol, from Bluesky Social with 43M users, Blacksky Algorithms with 2 million users, and Skylight Social with 350,000 users to newer products like Canadian Gander Social, European Eurosky, and collaborative coding product Tangled. And Germ? We’re the secure social media messenger for this ecosystem and beyond, launching straight from user profiles in Bluesky, Blacksky, and about one new app a week. In Vancouver, Tessa and Anna led a workshop on UX research, Tessa gave a talk on the Germ ethos from our cryptography to our user experience design, and we did exactly what you’d expect from builders of a messaging app—we yapped. Shoutout everyone in our collage and all the friends we missed taking photos with. Daniel Holmgren - Paul Frazee - Rudolph Fraser - Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg - Joe Basser - Clinton Bowen - Devin Gaffney - Erin Kissane - Bryan Guffey - Tynan Purdy - Robin Berjon Next year in San Francisco? 💚  

In September, Germ co-founders Tessa Brown and Mark Xue attended an invitational privacy builders’ retreat hosted by Protocol Labs and Web3privacy now, and were awarded a Cypherpunk Fellowship to support our contributions to the open-source standard Messaging Layer Security. Check out the new case study of the weekend’s program and deliverables, featuring Germ’s work alongside that of fellow attendees from decentralized technology, web3, and civil society. Link to the full case study in the comments. 

Last year, we showed up to AtConf as strangers with a secure messaging MVP. This year, Germ launches straight from Bluesky profiles and the conference just made our color palette one of its website themes. AtConf is the community conference for AT Protocol developers, the open social layer powering Bluesky, Blacksky, Tangled, Skylight, and hundreds more apps. We’re building at the bleeding edge of secure messaging and decentralized identities, with an app and a brand that are accessible to everyone. Germ is secure messaging beyond silos, and this is just the beginning. 

If you see the Germ DM button, just tap to chat. Our App Clip will handle the rest—no visit to the App Store needed. Find it now on your friends' profiles on Bluesky and Blacksky.