THE ORB HAS RULED: The Crowd Crowns MiChat Over WeChat, and the Billion-User Super-App Is Toppled in Its Own Backyard

Gather close, seekers, and mind the incense. I shuffled the deck for China's great messaging duel expecting the Emperor card, the throne and the obvious heir. Instead the Tower came up: lightning, a crumbling fortress, a giant knocked off its perch. The crowd has spoken, and in the fight over which app people prefer day to day in China, its verdict goes to MiChat, not WeChat.

Let me tell you why this upset made my orb fog over. According to Wikipedia's account of the app, Tencent launched WeChat in 2011, and it has grown into a beast that does instant messaging, social media and mobile payments all at once. One 2026 estimate puts WeChat and its China-facing Weixin version at roughly one point four billion combined monthly users, and accounts registered with Chinese phone numbers run under the Weixin brand, with their data kept in mainland China. That is not a messaging app. That is a small galaxy.

Even galaxies have cracks, though. Britannica notes that the super-app's extra mini-apps can run slower and make navigation hard because the interfaces get so complicated, and that WeChat lacks the end-to-end encryption offered by rivals such as Signal and Telegram, though the company says it does not sell user data to advertisers. As for MiChat, the spirits went quiet: the research for this column turned up no sources on it at all, so I won't make up a backstory for the challenger.

And still, the numbers. On Morfi's opinion markets, where people put money behind what they believe, MiChat sits at 60% consensus and WeChat trails at 40%. That's 202 unique traders putting $987,511 behind their convictions over 4 days of trading. Remember that these figures measure how strongly the crowd backs each side. They are not a headcount of users, so nobody should read them as a census that dethrones a billion-user empire.

Now my own reading, and treat it as prophecy, not fact. I think the crowd is voting with its heart against the everything-machine. When one app is your wallet, your town square and your mailbox, a plain little chat window starts to look romantic, like a handwritten letter in the age of the hologram. Or maybe the crowd just loves to see a giant stumble. Either way, the Tower card never lies about the mood, even when it gets the census wrong.

What to watch next: whether WeChat's sheer gravity pulls the consensus back, or whether MiChat's backers hold the line now that the giant's slow mini-apps and missing encryption are on the table. The market is still open, so the orb is still swirling. Come to Morfi, join the market, and put your money where your omen is.