Discord has officially completed its multi-year rollout of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for voice and video communications on the platform. The company confirmed that all supported voice calls, video calls, voice channels, and Go Live streams on Discord are now encrypted by default through its Discord Audio & Video Encryption (DAVE) protocol.
This latest update builds on Discord’s original announcement from 2024, when the company first began experimenting with E2EE for audio and video chats. DAVE was later expanded throughout 2025 to support web browsers, gaming consoles, bots, apps, and the Discord Social SDK.
Calls Are Encrypted By Default
Discord says the migration was officially completed at the beginning of March 2026, after requiring all supported clients to adopt DAVE before joining calls. It is also removing legacy fallback support for older unencrypted connections, meaning unsupported clients can no longer participate in voice or video sessions.
The platform says users generally do not need to manually enable anything, as E2EE is automatically enabled on supported clients. Users can verify whether a call is encrypted through a green lock icon and compare privacy codes with other participants to confirm call authenticity.
Exceptions
One notable exception to the rollout is Stage channels. Discord says these channels will continue using standard transport encryption instead of E2EE because they are designed more like public broadcasts for large audiences, including live events, community town halls and AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. According to the company, Stage channels operate differently from regular voice chats, making full end-to-end encryption impractical for that particular use case.
Additionally, the platform reiterated that text chats are still not end-to-end encrypted, and there are currently no plans to extend DAVE protections to messages. According to Discord, many moderation and platform features currently rely on text remaining accessible to its systems, making encrypted messaging a significantly larger engineering challenge.
Browser Hiccups
Discord also shared more technical details about the challenges behind bringing DAVE to browsers. During development, engineers encountered a Firefox-specific issue that prevented encrypted voice and video calls from functioning reliably in real-world conditions.
Rather than dropping Firefox support, Discord worked directly with Mozilla engineers to investigate the issue. The teams eventually traced the problem to a deadlock bug within Firefox’s WebRTC implementation, before submitting a patch that later shipped in Firefox 142.0. As a result, Discord now lists Firefox 142 as the minimum supported version for encrypted calls on the web.
(Source: Discord [official blog])
