The room where it’s decided — provably sealed.

BlackBoxNG is an invitation-only workspace for the most consequential conversations inside regulated institutions — board deliberations, M&A, crisis response. It delivers the two things no incumbent offers together: confidentiality the operator cannot break and governance a regulator will accept.

STATUS — IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT · CORE CRYPTOGRAPHY PROVEN

The problem

High-stakes conversations run on infrastructure built for someone else

Every existing option fails an institution in one of three ways — and firms have paid multi-billion-dollar fines discovering it.

Consumer messengers

Strong crypto, zero governance

WhatsApp and Signal encrypt well but offer no organisational identity, no membership control, no audit trail — and phone-number discovery leaks who is talking to whom. Using them puts regulated firms in breach.

Enterprise suites

Governed, but not confidential

Teams and Slack answer to compliance — because the vendor holds the keys. Content is readable by the provider, subpoenable through them, and one compromised admin exposes everything.

Sovereignty regimes

The jurisdiction is the risk

For EU institutions, Gulf sovereigns and defence-adjacent firms, the question isn’t only who reads the message — it’s whose cloud, in whose jurisdiction, the server sits in at all.

What is being built

Decision rooms: a deal room that talks

The product's unit is the decision room — a small, membership-controlled space where a specific group deliberates and shares documents. Not a chat app with channels; a sealed room with a roster.

Inside a room: end-to-end encrypted messaging, encrypted document sharing (files are encrypted on your device before upload; the server stores ciphertext it cannot read), a member list that names every device in the room, and a retention policy chosen at creation.

Around the rooms: invitation-only identity — no public signup, no phone numbers, members come only from your organisation's directory — and multi-device support where every laptop and phone is its own removable cryptographic identity.

The principle

Split trust between content and coordination

The server coordinates but cannot read. It is structurally incapable of accessing content — no keys, no plaintext, an audit log with no content column by design.

The server coordinates

Visible · governable
  • room membership, joins & removals
  • device registry, per-device credentials
  • message timing & ciphertext sizes
  • epoch history of every group
  • metadata-only audit log
  • retention policy per room

The edge encrypts

Sealed · unreadable
  • message content
  • documents & files
  • every private key
  • local history on each device
  • recovery — none exists, by design

The left column is what a compliance officer needs. The right column is what an adversary wants — and what the operator cannot produce, because it never exists server-side. Read the full threat model →

How it’s built

Audited standards, one codepath, sovereign by construction

RFC 9420 · one codepath

Standards, not invention

End-to-end encryption on MLS (RFC 9420), the IETF's group-messaging standard, via one Rust core — natively tested, compiled to every platform. The value is an auditable implementation, not a novel protocol that would fail review.

Invite-only · per-device

Institutional identity

No public signup, no phone numbers. A user is their set of devices — each one individually visible, verifiable, and removable from every room it touches.

Metadata audit · retention

Governance without access

“Who was in the room, when, from which device” — answerable. “What did they say” — answerable by no one. Accountability and confidentiality, usually opposites, delivered together.

No escrow · single binary

Sovereign by construction

No key escrow means no compellable backdoor. A single static server binary and per-organisation data model make on-prem and air-gapped deployment a first-class path, not a retrofit.

The one-sentence version
Provable confidentiality with institutional governance — for organisations that can’t get both from anyone else. The moat is that the line has never been crossed.