There are a lot of news stories regarding the coming of “crypto winter.” One of the most popular firms in the industry, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, has announced a significant layoff among an increasing number of bankruptcies.
One of the “more interesting parts of crypto right now” is at the “intersection of social messaging and web3,” according to renowned entrepreneur and investor Elad Gil. Behind the scenes, however, many founders and venture capitalists are doubling down on the promise of largely decentralized, blockchain-based businesses. In other words, he believes that current messaging platforms are inadequate and that new chances will arise for crypto-native firms to succeed.
Gil has already placed a wager, leading a $4 million seed round in the startup Lines, whose three co-founders are Harvard-educated philosophers. Sahil Handa, the CEO of the startup, boasts that it will become “web3’s messaging platform” even as he and his former classmates are still working on the technology.
Lines’ supporters, who also include famed angel investors Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, and Gokul Rajaram, don’t seem to mind that it’s still a work in progress. They are supporting a vision in which every web3 native is some way connected to a verified communications platform.
It is significant, according to Handa, since “a fast-growing number of users utilize crypto pseudonyms to buy digital money, trade NFTs, vote on proposals, and administer treasuries.” “But there’s no means of knowing whether or not they are talking to the appropriate person every time someone attempts to speak with another person in this network,”
Meanwhile, Lines aims to make it possible for users to join group conversations based on token ownership and transmit messages from wallet to wallet. In fact, Handa outlines a communication layer that, despite its ambivalence about the underlying blockchains and crypto wallets, empowers users in a broad range of ways.
Indeed, Gil believes that time is ideal for Lines as more individuals use the internet to coordinate and conduct business as a group. He writes that in the past, “I would have less motive to ping an anonymous user via their wallet because your bitcoin or crypto asset and mine were similar. However, DAOs require more than merely using Discord when it comes to member coordination.
The question is whether there will be enough support for Lines’ ideal answer. Like with any messaging tool, how many people use it will primarily decide how valuable it is. The startup’s ability to create relationships with influential platforms like OpenSea, which it needs on its side, will depend on how many people use it.
In the interim, Handa and co-founders will soon compete with other messaging apps that are attempting to compete with Twitter, Telegram, or Discord, where the majority of web3 conversations currently take place and where phishing attempts and other scams are common because it’s virtually impossible to confirm that people are who they claim to be.
Gil acknowledges that “several teams working on identification, social layers, and communication on top of web3” are already known to him.
The majority of them are still operating covertly, but some are starting to go public. For instance, last month, the Nansen crypto analytics platform released a messaging app that, according to the company, enables users to sign in using a cryptocurrency wallet and then join to groups based on their cryptocurrency holdings and the NFTs that they can prove they actually possess. The company promotes the application as a “crypto-native messaging center” for web3 groups, similar to Lines.
