This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Welcome to the Session Ecosystem AMA. I'm Alex Linton, the president of the Session Technology Foundation and I'm joined today by Chris McCabe and Kee Jefferys, co-founders of Session.

Here's how this is going to work. You, the Session community, have sent in questions to us and we are going to go through and answer as many of them as thoroughly as we can. This video will be posted up on the Session YouTube channel and there will also be clips across our different social media channels. Let's hop straight into it and start answering some questions.

First, we're going through questions about Session Token.

First question: Could you provide an update on the status of SESH being listed on CoinMarketCap?

Kee: The application process has begun. All the details have been sent across. It takes a few weeks for that to go live. We are live currently on CoinGecko and DexScreener and a few other platforms that provide information on the token. Check out CoinGecko for now and it'll be on CoinMarketCap shortly.

Alex: And a follow-up from the same person: Are there any plans or timelines for listing SESH on centralized exchanges? Understanding both of these aspects will help the community gauge the token's accessibility and visibility moving forwards.

Chris: Centralized exchanges are a good promotional tool. From my perspective, it'd be great to see Session launched on a centralized exchange when Pro launches as well to maximize exposure towards the token and the application and bring all that together with Session Token and Session Messenger. Hopefully, Q4 is when the focus will be back on centralized exchanges, but it could happen anytime before or after that.

Alex: Next question. This is more of a technical one for you, Kee. There's a 25,000 SESH stake requirement to run a full node which can be contributed by multiple people. What happens to a multi-contributor node when one of the contributors decides to withdraw their locked stake?

Kee: It's very similar to the way that it worked in Oxen. You can have up to 10 contributors to a node, and if any of those contributors decides to withdraw or exit from the node, that starts a timer. After that timer ends, everyone gets unstaked from that node.

We do have better controls in the smart contract now. We have this thing called a small contributor, and if you're under a certain amount of Session Tokens, then you have to wait at least 30 days from when you staked into the node to request an exit. There's more time required now because what we saw in Oxen was that contributors would come along and contribute to a node and then immediately request an exit, which would start this 15-day timer. We've set up rules so that you have to wait at least 30 days, and then there's another period of time that you have to wait before the node unlocks. That should make it easier for operators running multi-contributor nodes.

Alex: On the back of that, staking in the staking portal is much faster and easier than what it used to be with Oxen. It's straightforward. If you haven't checked it out, definitely go to stake.session.org. It is clean, and that's one of the key reasons for moving across to Arbitrum and being EVM compatible - it makes all these things more streamlined.

Kee: Absolutely.

Alex: Another question about staking, Kee. Is there a program to make it easier for setting up a node, for example with a GUI or an easy setup?

Kee: There isn't currently. Right now you have to grab a VPS or use your home computer and set up the service node software, and then you'll get a code from that service node software. You enter that - it's like a URL - and then that allows you to prepare your registration and stake through the staking portal.

Something that has been interesting, and is even easier right now with the new staking setup that we have, is potentially the ability to hook into some of these VPS's auto-setup tools. For example, Digital Ocean has this imaging thing where you can install an image from the marketplace, and we could consider putting Session or the Session node software up on that marketplace. You provision a droplet on Digital Ocean and then you install the Session node software from the marketplace, and then maybe you only have to run a couple of commands or maybe there's a web interface where you can click a few buttons and stake from there.

That's something that's interesting to us, but it would require more work. There is also a trade-off there because you do want the node operators in the network to have some level of technical understanding because if something goes wrong with their node, they should be able to log into that node and maybe run some commands to fix it. There's a balance between making it too easy where you have everyone coming in, and too hard where the cost to run a node in terms of the administration cost becomes high and that reflects in the fees that people charge for nodes.

Another thing that we've always been focused on is native delegated staking. We have that whole system where you can have an operator run a node and you can stake into their node, so you don't need to take on any of the technical complexity of running the node yourself. You can stake into someone else's.

Alex: Chris, this one's for you. Many projects aim to list on a centralized exchange at TGE, but Session Token went with a DEX launch. What was the reasoning for that?

Chris: Coming up to launch, we had to make a few choices - to either focus on the product and push it towards Pro and premium features and continue growing at the current rate that we have. We had to be choosy with allocating resources, and if we'd allocated those resources to a centralized exchange or multiple centralized exchanges, we would probably not be able to hit the targets that we've laid out in terms of delivering token utility in Session and expanding to millions of users. Short-term, no TGE centralized exchange launch, but it is something that we're open to in the future.

Alex: Will there be a plan to approach more popular crypto influencers or even paid advertising and awareness campaigns on social media following the release of Session Pro?

Chris: Absolutely. We're always on the lookout for influencers who are value-driven and aligned with the project and can help us boost engagement with the token and the messaging application. When it comes to direct advertising and paid advertising, that'd be very effective when we launch Session Pro because you'll have a product that people can purchase and advertising people towards that product. That's definitely a path to take when we launch Pro, but we're always open to crypto influencers who are value-aligned with us and are keen to get involved with the project.

Alex: I think we can move on to the second section now, which is going to be more focused on Session features - in terms of future Session features, current Session features, all of the technical and strategic plans for the application.

First one's for you, Kee. Will Session allow users to have multiple account IDs on one device?

Kee: Short answer: yes. Long answer is it's going to take some time before we get there. All of the contributors that are working on Session are heavily focusing on the first version of Session Pro right now, which will contain a few features. It's not everything that we want to offer in Session Pro, but it's the initial offering with some lower technical lift features to get it out there and to gauge appetite for Session Pro, and then add additional features over time.

To give you an example, one of the things that we are looking at putting into Session Pro is increased group limits. When you create a group, right now it's 100 members, and being able to extend beyond that to have groups up to 300 members, for example, may be a feature that we put in Pro. It's something that we're looking at heavily right now.

That's something that we came up with in the last couple of months. We initially wanted to start the Session Pro offering with increased file sizes, which we think is one of the most requested features across all of the platforms - increased file sizes larger than 10 megabytes, which is the limit right now. But we decided to focus on some easier to deliver features, and then we're going to add stuff like increased file sizes later because it's a heavier technical lift.

It's the same with multi-account. Multi-account is one of the most requested features, but it will take a bit to build out. It's not the simplest feature, and depending on how it's implemented, it has quite a bit of complexity. That's something that we'll look to add at a later point.

Alex: Chris, why are we managing a community in a closed competitor environment - that's talking about Discord - when Session supports large group chats?

Chris: Each platform offers a different value proposition. Discord's really good for having big communities with multiple channels and little warrens that people can discuss specific topics in. When it comes to a Session community, as amazing as they are, it's quite difficult to have in-depth discussions when you have a thousand or 10,000 people in one channel. It's really hard to keep a topic or a thread alive and keep a valuable discussion going on.

Having node operators having moderators, having broad community and different discussion topics is something that's quite hard to do in a Session community right now. It'd be something that would be awesome to have in the future, so it would be great to bring every single person across to Session. I don't disagree with that, but for the time being, given where people are and how you're attracting people to be in a specific community, it seems that Discord is the right place for that in this moment, and we're utilizing that to have engaging and open communication with the community.

Kee: Off the back of that - the Session communities are still there to chat in, and we hang around those official communities to answer people's questions. One of the biggest challenges that we've had with communities in the last six months is around moderation of those communities, because Session doesn't require a phone number to sign up or a real-world identifier. Moderation becomes much more challenging, and that's something that we're working on.

We have these captcha bots that we're working on, a plugin system to enable operators of communities to better moderate their communities. That is another task to put on the list of tasks that we want to do, and right now because we're focusing on Pro heavily, the community's moderation stuff has fallen into the background. But we do plan to get back to that point.

Looking forward to the next two to three years, down the road, I really do want to move people from Discord to Session, because you don't really want to be using your competitor or a competitor to Session to be hosting the Session community. The end goal is to bring everyone over to Session. It's not there right now.

Alex: Kee. Session contributors recently released the Session Network page with information about Session Token and the network that powers Session. Are there any other in-app awareness features for Session Token or the ecosystem behind Session planned?

Kee: We're going to be making additional tweaks to the Session Network page to bring the token and the app even closer together. Right now there's no link for how you would obtain Session Token if you wanted to from the Session application. We'll be adding links into the network page to the Uniswap pools, for example, if you want to buy a Session Token, you can do that there. That'll create a stronger link between the two.

But longer term, we do want to look at stuff like wallet integration. That would be having the ability to have an EVM-based wallet inside of Session that you can send Session Tokens to other users, you can also send other currencies to other users. We want to build that framework in a very similar way to how Telegram has done their wallet in-app, because we think that that's a really good design and has gotten a lot of Telegram users into the crypto world.

That's something that's on the longer term for us, and there's a bunch of things that we can do in the application to get people more familiar with Session. We'll be looking at that over the next six to 12 months, but the focus is on Session Pro right now. We are rushing as fast as we can towards getting Session Pro in the application, and then it's about how do we tie the token and the application further together, and that's through features like wallet integration.

Alex: Have you considered branding Session as a fun and cool yet private messaging app? Take a look at Family Wallet - have you considered making Session's UI look like that?

Kee: We did some work recently with UX/UI designers. This was six months ago or thereabouts, and they did suggest some changes to Session's branding to make it more approachable. We've been focused on getting this user who is very technical, more of a crypto-native user, someone who's looking for the most private and secure messaging application. Session's branding thus far has been around that idea, which is why you land on the Session website and it's got all these glitchy, Matrix-style green terminal stuff.

But as we move from that highly technical user, that crypto-native user, to a wider user base, it is right to also expand the branding and soften the edges on some of that more cypherpunk branding that we have right now. We are looking at some changes there, and also we want to bring in the STF more to some of the branding to talk more about our open source - we're open source and we're running a nonprofit, and there's all of these cool things about Session that we don't necessarily talk about upfront. It would be interesting to bring some of those things in. It's definitely something that we're thinking about.

Chris: It was the correct decision to make to go with that cypherpunk look originally. Session is at the core of its heart as a piece of technology, but now the technology is mature enough that really anybody can use it. Like Kee's saying here, it's time for the way Session looks and speaks to start to reflect that more. We've already done a lot of the research into what that will look like, and you'll start to see that playing out over the next six to 12 months.

Alex: If payments are made in fiat and converted to SESH in the backend, will there be a native option to pay for SESH directly inside of Session using a wallet?

Chris: I would love to add such a feature. There's a bunch of rules in app stores that we have to follow. As much as it'd be amazing to have direct SESH payments in application, we have to work around some limitations. It'd be great to do, I'm very for it, I would love to do it. It's obviously the first thing that we'd want to do, but we need to make sure we're not getting taken off Google Play Store and App Store because that's where the majority of our user base is. It'd be a great thing to do, I definitely want to do it. It's a wait and see. We can probably do it in desktop versions but maybe not in mobile versions.

Kee: Just to give more context - this is something that other people will have heard about. Epic Games is battling this massive lawsuit against Apple right now, which is for the Fortnite game, because they want to be able to offer certain in-app payments for Fortnite, but they don't want to use the App Store payment mechanisms. They want to offer that payment mechanism themselves.

Epic Games won that lawsuit in the US, which opens up our options more for what we can do in the US App Store. But other countries aren't as permissive yet, so it seems like Apple is still dragging their feet about offering in-app payments with external payment mechanisms that they don't get their 30% cut on.

We have to balance both the in-app payment rules and also the cryptocurrency rules that the App Store and the Google Play Store have, and that's often a tricky balance to get right. What you'll see first from Session Pro is that we'll offer in-app payments through Apple and Google, and then we will look at putting in external payment gateways so that if you want to subscribe to Session Pro using crypto or direct credit card payments or PayPal, for example, those options will be offered outside of the application. You can make your subscription there and then you can import it into one of the Session clients.

It's a tricky thing and relates to what the app store policies are and how they change over the next 6 to 12 months, because there is a lot of change happening right now.

Alex: How about making Session a platform where people can create, sell, and buy stickers? I know this is something you've looked into, Kee.

Kee: Stickers - they sound very easy on the surface, but there's quite a bit of technical complexity behind stickers. It is something that has been requested for a very long time and is a highly requested feature. People really like using stickers on Telegram, for example, but it is something that's a bit of a heavier lift.

That'll be something that we will look to do eventually, but it's after the initial Session Pro comes out, after we put some more features in, fix some more core bugs to the application, then we'll be looking at stickers. It involves some file server changes, some client changes, and then you need to consider how people upload their new sticker packs and then how people import those. There's a few tricky things there, but it's definitely something that we want to do in the future.

Alex: That wraps up all of the questions about Session features. We had a couple of questions about the STF, the Session Foundation, so I'll run through those quickly now.

How will the Foundation respond to Switzerland's transformation into a privacy surveillance state? I'm assuming this is referring to the proposed changes to a couple of ordinances here in Switzerland earlier this year relating to KYC and encryption.

Luckily, Switzerland has a very strong privacy community - it's a grassroots community and it's also a community with some major players, like Proton and Threema. Session or Session Technology Foundation is very happy to have joined this community, and we will be pushing back against these proposals alongside our allies here in Switzerland. We've already participated in that initial consultation and we're waiting to see what happens next.

Obviously we will always advocate for strong and responsible privacy laws, which the proposed ordinance changes are absolutely not. But of course, we're not going to do any whiplash reactions. We're going to wait and see what happens, keep our heads straight for now. Hopefully, we're hoping for the best and we're doing everything we can to pull in the direction of privacy and encryption.

Alex: As this AMA is about the ecosystem, what specific opportunities are STF folks going to open for non-insiders? Which specific smart contracts are needed, and how will the STF communicate with non-insiders?

Kee: I don't necessarily have the answers with respect to specific smart contracts. A lot of that work is already being done by existing Session contributors. But something that we're looking to do from the STF side is open up a grants program, which will be open to the public. People will be able to make proposals for certain grant amounts in order to work on specific projects or activities.

There'll probably be some sort of pre-designated sections that we'll be accepting proposals for. If you want some hints as to what those sections are going to be, I would point you towards the STF's ecosystem growth vision document, which is already public and outlines what the STF sees as being important development and education and communication steps to take Session and grow it going forwards.

Alex: What is your take on DAOs, Swiss law, security classification, and Google ToS?

Personally, I'm a huge fan of DAOs and I'd be very interested in introducing a DAO to the governance structure of the Session ecosystem sometime in the future. It's not something that we're actively looking into right now, but absolutely something that is philosophically aligned with us.

Chris: I agree with that concept. I love the concept of DAOs. I haven't seen a DAO that's been effective to date, but now there's technology out there that makes it more streamlined to manage a DAO. It's only getting easier to create and run an effective DAO. It's something that I'm interested in. I've always been interested in DAOs, and I think the time is coming where DAOs are more effective. I think it could be a good option for the Session Foundation in the future to implement some sort of DAO structure, but what that looks like right now is still unclear.

With Swiss law, I don't know what that is as a question, but I like their self-sovereignty. I like the concept. I like their good balance between freedom and responsibility as a nation. You get all these really good rights, but you get all these responsibilities at the same time, and that's valued by Swiss people. It's not freedom - it's individual responsibility, down to an individual level, which is really awesome.

I don't want to get too much into the legal system, but I somewhat like their legal system. If you look at any legal system from a high level, you can always find issues with it and what you don't like with them. But there's good things where they lay out clearly - this is what you can do and this is what you can't do. Pick which path you want to take, and it makes it really easy. For Session and Session Token, it is a utility token in Switzerland. Follow these rules and everything's good. Whereas in America and Australia, it was very unclear, and in many countries it's very unclear, and you're walking down a minefield and hoping for the best. It's good in a sense that they've made that really clear.

Google Terms of Service - which one? Which line? There's so much stuff in those 50,000-page agreements that you sign every few weeks. I don't like signing something that big ever. At the same time, the frequency - it really depends on what part of Google Terms of Service are concerning for people. But pretty much any big tech company will cover their ass immensely, and it's hard for a simpleton to even understand them, let alone read them every few weeks. I don't really have much of an opinion on them other than they could shorten them and make them easier for people to understand and stop using people's data in a way that is not ideal.

Alex: Let's move on to final comments. There are a couple of miscellaneous questions, and if you guys want to hop on your soapbox, then you're free to do so in this section.

Kee, is it planned to host a series of videos on the different cryptographic protocols and the architecture of Session?

Kee: That would be a really cool thing to do. One of the things that we've struggled with, but it's also been a double-edged sword - it's good but it's also bad at the same time - is that a lot of the complexity of Session is hidden. When people pick up Session, they don't necessarily know that they're using a decentralized network and that their messages are being onion-routed and they have this swarm that's storing their messages.

That's great for new users that are coming on to the network because they don't have to get over this hill of massive technical complexity that often turns people away from new technologies. But at the same time, you also want to highlight the ways that Session is different and that it's providing an additional level of privacy and security versus WhatsApp or Telegram.

That's where Session contributors have been working on some of these new screens which have been coming into the application. Very early on, we added the path screen, which shows your onion route in an easy to understand way, and now we've added the Session Network screen, which shows information about your swarm and other information about the Session Token.

In terms of videos and video content there, that would also be great to do because you don't necessarily need to push it into people's faces. If they want to understand how the network works, they can do additional digging on that, and we can link them up to the docs.

The challenge there is, of course, as soon as you create a piece of video content, the protocol changes, and now you have to update that video content again. That's something that we've struggled with - keeping the docs up to date with the protocol because the protocol moves fast.

But maybe it could be possible to build something that's more general that talks about swarms, for example, or talks about onion routing and what Session is doing on that side without going too deep into the protocol level so that it stays relevant over time. Definitely an interesting idea, and something that we will look to do in the future.

Alex: That's all of the questions that we had to run through. Do either of you have any tangents that you want to go on or final words that you want to leave the community with?

Kee: The development side of Session is moving very fast right now - faster than it ever has before. There's more bugs being fixed by Session contributors, there's more features coming into the application. The process of putting new features in is starting to be really effectively streamlined, and a lot of that is through our focus on building stuff in a single library, which is called libsession. It's technical, but that essentially allows us to build the core of features once and then import those into the rest of the application.

We're starting to see the benefit of that, and for users, the application is starting to feel better. Reviews are going up, people are downloading Session at an increased rate, people we're hearing stories of people being retained more than they were previously. All signs are pointing towards positive growth for Session right now, and I think that's fantastic for not Session users but also the wider Session ecosystem that we're all participating in here.

Chris: The transition - doing a token launch or a token transition whilst having an application with over a million users is a challenging time, but it's launched now and the community sentiment is relatively good. I want to say thanks to all the positive feedback and constructive feedback and support from third parties to launch and push forward.

Really looking forward to pushing Session to its absolute limits, getting Pro out there, bringing in more of the token features and information into the application, and bringing those two communities together and expanding on that. We're looking forward to the future and really happy and glad of the support that we've had to date from the community.

Alex: We're in a really exciting phase right now for the ecosystem, for the wider space, and we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the community and all of the Session contributors and people that are part of this ecosystem that is growing and delivering privacy to people every day.

Thank you for your time today, Kee and Chris. It has been a pleasure talking with you and answering all of these questions. Hopefully we'll be able to do another AMA soon, and of course, if you need to find us, you can find us in all of the community channels either on Session or controversially on Discord, and of course on social media. We'll talk to you all soon. Thank you.