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Discord has just announced that all voice and video calls that take place on its platform will now enjoy end-to-end encryption.
You may be forgiven for thinking the platform already had this in place, but that's not the case. The platform began 'experimenting' with end-to-end encryption back in 2023, but has only just made it the standard for almost every call.
The vice president of technology at Discord, Mark Smith, dove into some depth about the multi-year process of implementing end-to-end call encryption. Long story short, 2024 saw the introduction of DAVE (no, not that one), Discord's very own encryption protocol. If you'd like to take a closer look at DAVE (still not that one), Discord has made it open-source via GitHub.
Smith explains, "We began migrating calls on desktop and mobile and started proving that E2EE could operate at Discord's scale without compromising the experience people expect from us."
Then in 2025, DAVE was extended to every remaining Discord platform, such as the browser-based app and console-based apps. Smith writes, "At the beginning of March 2026, we completed that migration."
That's the briefest of overviews, but already hints at what a social beast Discord has become, and just how many moving parts this migration had to account for. "The thing that makes Discord's voice and video infrastructure unusual isn't just scale — it's diversity," Mark Smith writes, "A single Discord call can have someone on a laptop, someone on their phone, someone on a PlayStation, someone on an Xbox, and someone in a web browser, all in the same conversation at the same time."
He goes on to add, "Every one of those participants expects Discord’s high-quality, low-latency communications, regardless of what device they're on. Building an E2EE protocol that works seamlessly across all of those surfaces simultaneously is, to my knowledge, unlike anything else that's been shipped. DAVE is likely one of the internet’s most platform-diverse E2EE voice and video implementations."
It's definitely an impressive project that represents a recommitment to user privacy. You may remember that the embattled social platform experienced a lot of pushback over proposed age verification measures, particularly after the potential exposure of 70,000 users' personal data in a data breach last year.
Though the platform has delayed rolling out age checks globally in light of criticism, the platform has already deployed age verification in the UK in accordance with local law there (though critics argue the platform did not need to comply in advance). As a long-time user in the UK, I've managed to avoid these latest checks. All the same, here's hoping that the user privacy win of end-to-end encryption isn't soon undone by poorly implemented age checks in the near future.
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