Dominic Williams says the messenger targets more than 100 million users and runs on a dedicated Pakistan subnet
Most governments that want a national messaging app go shopping at a big cloud provider. Pakistan went to a blockchain.
DFINITY founder Dominic Williams announced on October 28, 2026 that Pakistan is developing a national chat and messenger application on Internet Computer (ICP) infrastructure. The intended audience is more than 100 million users.
What Pakistan is building
The app covers the features people now treat as table stakes in a messenger. That means instant messaging, plus audio and video calls.
It runs on a dedicated Pakistan subnet, branded the “Pakistan Cloud Engine.” The setup is designed to meet data localization requirements set by the Pakistani government.
The project is not starting from a blank page either. Updates from August and September 2026 indicated the app was nearing feature completion on its core functions.
The OpenChat team has been actively contributing to development within the ICP ecosystem.
From memorandum to messenger
The roots of the project go back to February 2026. That month, Pakistan’s Digital Authority and the DFINITY Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding.
The stated aim of the agreement was to create a sovereign national subnet on ICP. The chat app is where that groundwork starts to look like something an ordinary citizen would actually open on a phone.
The partnership went from a signed agreement in February, to a near-complete app by late summer, to a public announcement in October.
What this means for ICP and for governments
For Pakistan, the goal is a stronger digital governance framework. The government wants to offer citizens secure, efficient communication tools while keeping sensitive data under local control.
For ICP, a nation-state choosing the network for a public service aimed at more than 100 million people is a strong signal that decentralized infrastructure can be pitched for real workloads.
It could also shift how the market thinks about the ICP token. The conversation has often centered on speculative trading. A government deployment of this size gives supporters a concrete use case to point to instead.
The risks worth watching
The first thing to track is the gap between target and reality. The 100 million figure describes who the app is aimed at, not who is using it today.
The second issue is performance at scale. Text messages are forgiving. Audio and video calls are not, and they will test whether the subnet can deliver smooth service when large numbers of users pile on at once.
The third question is philosophical, and it may matter most to the crypto crowd. Blockchains are typically sold on decentralization, while this project emphasizes sovereignty and state control over data.
