A stealthy Chinese app developer -- funded entirely by a former American commercial real estate developer -- is expected to file for an $1B IPO in the next few months, seeking to cash into the mobile app craze without selling to Facebook.

The company, TWOconAPP, specializes in “ethereal high-performance secret mobile applications,” according to corporate documents. A stealthy investor in the operation, who asked not to be named, says it plans to file through Hong Kong but also file as an ADR on U.S exchanges. Its growth rate may exceed big successes such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram, said the source.

The secret? TWOconAPP is “the most ethereal and secret app ever built,” says the investor, a former commercial real-estate developer from Chicago who holes up in Shanghai with new industrial and technology business interests in Malaysia, China and India. He also owns a casino in Macau. The investor, who I knew from the optical networking days when he made big investments in optical high flying IPOs such as Corvis, gave me a call early this morning during Asia business hours to bring me up to date.

“Think about it,” he said. “The goal is to be even more Secret than Secret,” he said. “And more ethereal than Snapchat.”

So what is the big secret? Why is this company so quiet, even though he claims it's now adding users at a rate of approximately 2.5 million people per day?

“The first secret,” whispered my deep-throat source, “is to be even better than the others. Think about it: Snapchat. Ten Seconds, right? TWOcanAPP messages last for only two seconds.”

Two seconds. Interesting. “That's pretty quick for a message,” I said.

“Yes. TWOconAPP. But there's more... It's also got a proprietary memory scrubber that doesn't allow vestiges of the message to be left in memory. It's locked against hackers... and get this. Do you know how long the messages can be?”

“No,” I said.

“Only two characters long,” he said.

“Two characters?” I asked. “But if you only have two seconds and two characters, how can you possibly transmit reasonable information? I mean, 'LOL' doesn't even work.”

“They can only be consonants,” he said. “You will see. It's absolutely huge. But there's more ...”

“What's that?” I asked.

“The app self-destructs after two hours. So you have to reinstall it.”

“And pay another $1?”

“Two dollars,” he said. “TWOcanAPP costs two dollars. Yes, every two hours. Imagine millions of people re-installing their app every two hours and paying two dollars to message people two consonants for two seconds.”

I began to see his point. Yes, obviously, this is the next big thing in technology. Keep an eye on TWOconAPP.