Welcome to Web3 Por Favor, where I explore the future of consumer applications. Catch me on Twitter to chat all things Web3. All views in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer, Foundation.

To date, crypto wallets have mostly behaved like a physical wallet - it holds your money and you connect it to dapps when you want to transact. Last year when NFT adoption picked up dramatically, some wallets, such as Rainbow, made it so that you can see your NFTs from your wallet interface.

Pretty neat - but what else can be done with wallet? This tweet got me thinking what could be next:

If you have spent any time in Discord with an interest in Web3, it is glaringly obvious that the platform falls short on multiple fronts. As a gamer-first communication platform, it gained additional momentum when Web3 founders started to leverage it to bootstrap their communities. As communities have wanted to leverage the power of Web3, they have been using workarounds to extend Discord’s capabilities such as Collab.Land, which makes it possible for servers to token-gate access to specific channels based on whether someone owns the community’s ERC-20 or NFT. While Discord’s contributions to Web3 community development can’t be understated, it leaves so much to be desired.

This leads up to crypto wallets and how they might evolve to solve the pain points that Discord presents. Wallets are a source of truth for every person - they show what crypto assets are owned which maps directly to what activities they can participate in that require one to hold a particular asset. We can break down specific desirable features that could seemingly be built into a wallet:

Voting

Imagine a wallet UI that shows you upcoming votes for DAOs you are a member of. The ability to directly vote from that UI would dramatically increase participation.

Chat rooms

This essentially involves importing Discord’s main functionality - the ability to communicate with others based off of the servers you are in. This would also include direct messaging.

News feed

One of the biggest pain points I have with Discord is the ability to stay up to date on major announcements from servers that I really care about. If a wallet could aggregate messages posted to the announcements channel in servers I wanted to be notified about, I wouldn’t have to remember to go into every channel and manually check on regular basis.

Calendar

This feature would include things like upcoming NFT launches, snapshots/airdrops, AMA sessions, competitions, etc. and ideally would be filterable by the types of events you want to keep track of.

A big caveat of unifying a wallet and social experience is the amount of bad actors that would try to scam people. The amount of scammers in Discord is already out of control, and putting users one step closer to wallet functionality while communicating with others could amplify attack vectors for users who don’t practice proper security hygiene. This is a solvable problem - but it’s a very big one that needs thoughtful solutions that protect the average user while not introducing significant friction to the user experience.