Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, has released Buzz, a decentralized and open-source groupchat platform built for teams of people and AI agents. The launch was announced on July 22, 2026, and framed as a way to cut a team's dependence on centralized tools like Slack and GitHub. The primary source is Block's own announcement, surfaced by Cointelegraph.
The pitch is coordination software that a team controls rather than rents. Buzz is positioned as infrastructure a company can run and inspect for itself, with the code open for anyone to read, fork, or self-host. That framing puts it in the same lineage as Dorsey's other bets on protocols over platforms.
Coordination software as owned infrastructure
Most workplace chat today runs through a single vendor. Slack stores the messages, controls the uptime, sets the pricing, and can change terms at any time. Buzz inverts that arrangement. By making the platform open-source and decentralized, Block is arguing that a team's internal communication is too important to sit behind one company's login screen and billing portal.
The AI agent angle is the part that separates Buzz from a plain Slack clone. Buzz treats software agents as first-class participants in a channel alongside human staff. As teams wire more automated agents into their daily work, those agents need a shared place to post, read, and act. A groupchat layer that both people and bots can join natively is a bet on where team tooling is heading, not just a repackaging of where it has been.
Dorsey's protocol-first pattern
Buzz fits a consistent thesis Dorsey has pushed for years: build open protocols that no single entity owns. Block already backs Bitcoin mining hardware, the self-custody wallet Bitkey, and decentralized social work through Bluesky's underlying protocol. The through-line is reducing reliance on gatekeepers, whether the gatekeeper is a bank, a social network, or in this case a workplace SaaS vendor.
Naming GitHub as a target is notable. GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is where most of the world's code and much of its developer coordination lives. Pointing Buzz at both Slack and GitHub signals ambition beyond chat. It suggests Block wants a slice of the developer collaboration stack, the layer where teams talk, plan, and ship.
Whether that ambition holds up is a separate question. Slack and GitHub are deeply entrenched, with years of integrations, habits, and institutional lock-in behind them. Open-source and decentralized are strong selling points to a specific audience, mostly engineering-led and crypto-native teams, but they do not automatically translate into mass adoption. Signal-grade privacy tools have existed for years without displacing default corporate choices.
Sovereignty as the sales argument
The deeper theme here is platform sovereignty, the idea that organizations should own their core digital rails rather than lease them from a handful of large intermediaries. That argument runs through much of crypto, from self-custody wallets to decentralized messaging efforts like Telegram's planned non-custodial Gram wallet for its user base.
The same logic that pushes crypto users toward controlling their own keys pushes companies toward controlling their own coordination layer. If your team's entire operating history lives inside one vendor's database, that vendor holds real leverage. An open, self-hostable alternative changes who is dependent on whom.
For crypto-native organizations in particular, the appeal is direct. Teams that already run treasuries, sign transactions, and manage governance on open rails have a philosophical fit with tooling that follows the same principles. A decentralized groupchat where trading bots, monitoring agents, and human operators share one auditable channel is a plausible use case, not a stretch.
The open questions are practical. Details on hosting requirements, moderation, data portability, agent permissions, and how "decentralized" the architecture actually is will determine how far Buzz travels beyond early adopters. Block's track record with Bitcoin infrastructure and Bluesky's protocol gives the launch credibility, but shipping a product and unseating an entrenched incumbent are different challenges. This is an analysis of the launch as announced, not a prediction of market share.
Overview
Block, run by Jack Dorsey, has launched Buzz, an open-source and decentralized groupchat platform for teams of humans and AI agents, built to reduce dependence on Slack and GitHub. The move extends Dorsey's long-running preference for open protocols over closed platforms and leans on a sovereignty argument familiar from crypto: own your core infrastructure rather than rent it. The real test is adoption against two deeply entrenched incumbents, and the technical specifics of how decentralized Buzz is in practice will decide how seriously that challenge lands.
