Offline Transactions: The Final Frontier for Global Crypto Adoption

Apart from creating additional security layers, offline transactions could, in theory, enable complete censorship resistance for cryptocurrencies.

Crypto transactions are, by design, immune to payment blocking by third-party actors.

As long as crypto transactions require internet connectivity, there remains a single point of failure that can be exploited for censorship purposes.

The ability to carry out offline crypto transactions also creates another avenue for broader digital currency adoption.

Commenting on the potential impact of practical offline crypto transaction solutions, Richard Myers, a decentralized applications engineer at Global Mesh Labs and goTenna, stated that local meshnets can incentivize decentralized communication and facilitate efficient Bitcoin transactions.

Apart from creating a parallel P2P infrastructure for crypto transactions, these networks can also create channels for truly decentralized communication that is not under the control of any government.

Using SMS bridges or meshnets, users can broadcast these transactions throughout the network, all without needing internet connectivity.

Startups like goTenna that enable SMS capability in the absence of cellular connectivity have integrated with crypto wallets to allow offline transactions using text messages.

"The reason someone pursues 'offline' crypto transactions is to prevent potential hacks and stealing of private key, but the solution that is claiming to be 'air-gapped,' Bluetooth, radiofrequency - are all hackable by the fact that they need to be connected to the internet in some point to create a valid transaction. In that case, they still have attack vectors and if the attack vectors still exist in the solution, then the purpose of 'offline' crypto transactions isn't achieving its goal."

With improvements in mesh networks and long-range radio technology, cryptocurrency exchange and access to decentralized blockchain consensus networks will be possible without any final uplink to an internet connection.