Locha Mesh, a Venezuelan project that seeks to make cryptocurrency transactions, such as Bitcoin and Monero, possible without an Internet connection.
The cryptocurrencies, are one of the greatest technological innovations of our time, thanks to the freedom they give us by allowing us to manage our own money. However, the need to always have an internet connection to make effective transactions can be seen as one of the main obstacles that prevent their full adoption, especially in vulnerable populations that do not have this service, or in countries facing serious economic and social crises. To overcome this barrier, a group of Venezuelan developers created the project loach mesh, a project born for the construction of free devices capable of creating a powerful network that allows transactions with several of the most important and used cryptocurrencies in the world, such as Bitcoin (BTC) y Monero (XMR), without the need for an Internet connection.
According to its developers, Locha Mesh is both open source software and hardware, capable of creating a free and secure Mesh network for private chats, censorship-resistant websites, and cryptocurrency payments without the Internet. This project has been moving forward for some years, but its creators began to effectively test this network since 2020, and the most recent of these allowed carry out the transmission of data to perform Offline bitcoin transactions from a maximum distance of 7,16 kilometers (km).
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Try Turpial development kits
The creators of Locha Mesh called their devices hardware “Turpial development kits”, which consists of the equipment and nodes necessary for the transmission of data in a connectionless network. As explained by the developers in their repository en GitHubThe devices were tested earlier this month in an exposed, low-density environment to measure performance and the maximum distance the devices can travel to successfully complete transactions.
In this test, the developers managed to successfully carry out a transaction over a distance of 7,16 km; although they point out that the goal is to continue testing the capabilities of their equipment to overcome this distance, and also to carry out tests in denser and more urban environments.
For the development of the test, Luis Ruiz, one of the founding members of this project and its current CTO, explained that they deployed the first nodes of the “kit” to carry out range tests with static and mobile nodes from different locations, always monitoring the reception of the equipment. Once the Turpial node was established and operating at a fixed point, the developers began to deploy to other points to measure the connection capacity of the equipment.
Source: Locha Mesh on GitHub
According to the report presented, the team “witnessed and recorded the excellent quality of reception at several points at different altitudes, inside and outside the city”As already mentioned, the longest distance tested on test day was 7,16 km.
Source: Locha Mesh on GitHub
Connecting anyone, anywhere
Loche Mesh was born in Venezuela as a way to deal with the crisis facing the country, which also affects the availability of Internet networks in several areas. The developers of this project explain that the main objective is to establish a long-range network to allow anyone, from anywhere, to regain control of their data, communicating effectively outside the network, and offline, to send or receive payments and transactions in Bitcoin, Monero, Lightning Network and RPC-Pay; as well as chat with any user, send files, or browse and access websites in a censorship-resistant manner.
On its website, the project specifies that the Turpial device is open source, so anyone can purchase it and adapt it to their needs; users will also be able to customize this equipment to facilitate the creation and development of their own applications, for the benefit of the community itself.
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