I hear you. I never use the internet without Tor or VPN. You mentioned they shouldn't have implemented a 2-hop step like Tor.
Maybe I am misunderstanding. How are you saying the forwarding relay can track who you are sending things too? There is an additional layer of e2e encryption between the sender and the destination relay.
In addition, "each message forwarded to the destination relay is additionally encrypted with one-time ephemeral key, to be independent of messages sent to different connections."
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"Private message routing is, effectively, a 2-hop onion routing protocol inspired by Tor design, but with one important difference - the first (forwarding) relay is always chosen by message sender and the second (destination) - by the message recipient. In this way, neither side of the conversation can observe IP address or transport session of another.
At the same time, the relays chosen by the sending clients to forward the messages cannot observe to which connections (messaging queues) the messages are sent, because of the additional layer of end-to-end encryption between the sender and the destination relay, similar to how onion routing works in Tor network, and also thanks to the protocol design that avoids any repeated or non-random identifiers associated with the messages, that would otherwise allow correlating the messages sent to different connections as sent by the same user. Each message forwarded to the destination relay is additionally encrypted with one-time ephemeral key, to be independent of messages sent to different connections.
The routing protocol also prevents the possibility of MITM attack by the forwarding relay, which provides the certificate the session keys of the destination server to the sending client that are cryptographically signed by the same certificate that is included in destination server address, so the client can verify that the messages are sent to the intended destination, and not intercepted."