ChaCha20, were both independently designed, in 2005 and 2008, by Daniel J. Bernstein.

In March 2013, a proposal was made to the IETF TLS working group to include Salsa20, a winner of the eSTREAM competition to replace the aging RC4-based ciphersuites. A discussion followed in the IETF TLS mailing list with various enhancement suggestions, including using Chacha20 instead of Salsa20 and using a universal hashing based MAC for