Discord Voice and Video Calls Are Now End-to-End Encrypted

Discord announced this week that it recently brought end-to-end encryption to all voice and video calls on the platform. This is enabled by default on all calls, except on Stage channels, which are only available within Community servers for broadcasting to larger audiences.

Discord developed its own DAVE end-to-end encryption protocol for audio and video calls, which is open and externally audited. “We didn’t want to just ship encryption — we wanted to build something the broader community could inspect, validate, and hold us accountable for,” said Mark Smith, VP of Core Technology at Discord.

According to Smith, Discord is currently in the process of removing code enabling fallbacks to unencrypted calls. “Call quality and performance remain at the level our users expect. E2EE happens transparently. The experience hasn’t changed, the protection has,” Smith said.

Discord currently has no plans to bring end-to-end encryption to text conversations, however. “Many of the features people use on Discord were built on the assumption that text isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and rebuilding them to work with encryption is a meaningful engineering challenge,” Smith explained.

Discord recently made headlines after announcing its plans to require users to verify their age to continue accessing age-restricted content or change their default safety settings. Following strong pushback from its users, the company said that it was delaying the global rollout of these changes to the second half of 2026. The company also plans to add more verification options, including credit card verification. Lastly, Discord claimed that over 90% of Discord users will be able to continue to use the app without ever seeing an age verification prompt.