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There is no shortage of headlines about the beginning of “Crypto Winter”.In growth Bankruptcy mountainNFT Marketplace OpenSea, one of the busiest startups in the business, Major layoffs Only on this day.
But behind the scenes, many founders and VCs have doubled the promise of mostly decentralized blockchain-based outfits, which is why one of the “more interesting parts of the current crypto” is. “Messaging and web3 at the” crossroads of society “,” says Elad Gil, a well-known entrepreneur and investor. In short, he believes that today’s messaging tools won’t cut it, and crypto-native startups will have new opportunities to get it right.
Gil has already made an early bet and is leading the $ 4 million seed round on Lines.The startup has three co-founders studying philosophy at Harvard University, and the CEO Sahill HandaIs proud that the early companies will become a “web3 messaging platform”, even while he and his ex-classmates are still developing the technology.
That it’s still an ongoing task is clearly not a problem for Lines backers, including renowned angel investors Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, and Gokul Rajaram. What they support is vision. A growing number of people are using cryptocurrencies to buy digital currencies, exchange NFTs, vote on proposals, and manage the treasury, explains Handa. “But whenever someone tries to communicate with another person in this network, there is no way to know if they are talking to the right person.”
Meanwhile, Lines strives to allow users to send messages from wallet to wallet and participate in group chats based on token ownership. Indeed, Handa draws a picture of an ambiguous communication layer for both the underlying blockchain and the particular crypto wallet used by humans, and as a result, empowers users in different ways. For example, you can find the owner of a particular NFT you want to buy, find like-minded individuals based on the tokens you get, or contact potential new contributors to DAO (a kind of “”.Group chat with a bank account“Because DAO was called).
Indeed, Gil believes the timing is right as more people organize and trade as a group online. Earlier, he said: “Since your Bitcoin or crypto assets were the same as mine, there was little reason to ping anonymous users via a wallet. But with DAO, not just using Discord, but a variety of things. In the world of web3, users “want to be able to identify and interact with people for governance, contribution rewards, airdrops, and more.” For NFTs and other collectibles, “I want to ping you to buy, sell, or trade, so there are other incentives to help the communication layer,” he adds.
The question is whether enough people agree that Lines is providing the exact right solution. As with all messaging apps to date, its value is largely determined by the number of people who use it. And how many people use it will determine whether a startup can partner with a platform like OpenSea.
Temporarily, Handa and its co-founders (who haven’t decided on a business model yet) will soon compete with Twitter, Telegram, or any other messaging app that’s trying to use Discord. Phishing attempts and other scams are almost impossible to verify if people are who they say they are. Rampant.
Gil himself states that he already knows “the various teams working on identity, social layers, and communication on Web3.”
Most of these are still flying under the radar, but some are beginning to appear publicly.For example, last month, a cryptographic analysis platform called Nansen Messaging app It means that the user logs in with a crypto wallet and holds the crypto NFT That they certainly own. Like Lines, the company describes the app as the “cryptographic native communication hub” of the web3 community.
NFT Marketplace, Rarible announced separately Wallet-based messenger function last year.
Naturally, Lines claims it has an advantage over others. So while Handa is far enough away to build an app that both crypto natives can understand while he and his friends are building for web3, it’s easy for web3 beginners to figure out. Say it can be used.
We’re focusing on client-side use cases, not how decentralized the messaging protocol itself is, says Handa, who is two credits away from graduation and will get a diploma. (“My treatise is about identity and web3 communication, so it’s not distracting at this point,” he says.)
He said, “We think it helps that we haven’t been in the field of cryptocurrencies for 10 years,” so “it’s not a super ideology about how we’re building a platform. We’re actually, We do it on the basis of what is meaningful from the consumer’s point of view and the community’s point of view. So many cryptographic products are not considered from the consumer’s point of view, “he continues. [with us],I can do it. “
Other investors in the Lines seed round include Scalar Capital, Volt Capital, Caffeinated Capital, Consensys Mesh, Hash3, Missief, and Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field, and entrepreneurial investor Scott Belsky. Includes individuals. According to Handa, Lines is using this capital to hire, and there are currently three more engineers on the market.
