We are thrilled to announce we have closed our first full-stack engineering sprint: the Beta of the Mail3 communication platform has shipped! At the dawn of Web3, Mail3 is here to serve all the web3 natives to establish more effective and valuable communications.
Why we need a Web3 native communication platform
Blockchains enable us to have open protocols, Dapps, and DAOs that are built on a fully decentralized infrastructure. The whole web3 is such an innovative network allowing people to know 'who owns what' on chain and follow the mechanism to coordinate, earn, collect, and trade in permissionless.
But there is one part been missed in the tech stack - messaging. We do have lots of ways to communicate today - Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, Gmail. Why is that not good enough? Firstly, there is not an effortless way of connecting between the ownership/ identity you have on chain and your communication, which makes the DAO unable to efficiently notify DAO token holders to vote, and users have no way to quickly find and communicate with NFT community members. Moreover, the native payment system of the decentralized society are completely decoupled with traditional communication platform. Users cannot transfer tokens during chat, nor can they send soul-bound tokens to friends in emails.
So, we start Mail3 with a very simple but ambitious vision - establishing a web3 native communication platform. With the build-in Web3 identity and the Web3 payment functionality, people can effectively reach each other and communicate freely.
Mail3 APP
Start Communication using your address and domain names
Wallet addresses can naturally identify a user. And domain name(such as ENS) is born to make wallet addresses much easier to read. So in Mail3, once the user connects the wallet, the email address can be automatically generated with wallet address and domain names, such as 0x1234512345@mail3.me and alice.eth@mail.me.
Mail3 aims to serve the whole web3 world, Mail3 will support all public chains and corresponding wallets, and domain names.
Address to Address Communication
There are two types of address: wallet address and contract address, and Mail3 supports both to achieve wallet to wallet communication and wallet to contract communication.
Wallet to Wallet Communication brings a total fresh experience. Address works as the decentralized and unified account in web3, enabling Alice to send mail to Bob anytime, anywhere. Normally, the traditional mail-to-mail message means that Alice needs to create an account first and give Alice’s mail address to Bob, after that Bob can send mail to Alice. In Mail3, Bob can send messages to Alice directly even without Alice registering Mail3 in advance. Anytime Alice comes to Mail3 or the Dapp adopting Mail3, Alice can check the messages sent from Bob before.
And what makes communication more effective is the wallet to contract communication. By sending emails to a contract address (we call Community Mail in Mail3), you can
- Send an inquiry to all owners of an NFT series
- Notify all the stakeholders on a Defi protocol hack
- Notify DAO token holders about the next DAO meeting
Connect Web2 and Web3
Mail3 adopted the standard SMTP protocol, which enables Mail3 users to communicate with traditional Email users. The team spends tons of time investigating and solving all kinds of compatibility issues, because we believe that Mail3 will be the most popular email service for people daily-use, instead of a fancy Web3 demo that can only be used in the Web3 world.
Web3 Identity
Address to Address Communication may bring spam problems. Traditional mailboxes identify a scam by complex algorithms relying on monitoring users’ email content. Users sacrifice their privacy and still have no control over their inbox.
Mail3 adopts a user’s Web3 identity to solve this problem, it allows users to control who can reach them, based on the sender’s web3 identity.
In web3, because user identity can be shaped by his/her on-chain behaviors (NFT, Token, social graph, TX, etc.), Mail3 will support users to filter their inbox based on a bunch of criteria including ownership of a specific NFT, possession of a Poap, membership in a given DAO, social connection in web3 or even a combination of the above in the future.
The future
We know there are still many difficult challenges to face in the next few months and years—creating a secure and usable privacy scheme, being composable with other applications and protocols, combining the payment system, building economy mechanisms to incentivizing valuable communication, discovering new crypto-native business models.
But we knew that the starting point for the Mail3 MVP is supporting a basic web3 communication demand experience—the ability to communicate with everyone anywhere anytime.
We really need all kinds of feedback for web3 builders and enthusiasts, please following us or joining the community!