Discord just got the privacy feature it probably should have had for years, introducing end-to-end encryption for very nearly every voice and video call
Publish Date: 2026-05-19 11:11:00
Source Domain: www.pcgamer.com
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.
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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.”
(Image credit: Jim Sugar via Getty Images / Discord)
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…
