Cryptographic native messaging platforms for web3: the challenge for start-ups

Gil already made an early gamble, leading a $4 million seed round on Lines, a start-up whose three co-founders studied philosophy at Harvard and whose executive director, Sahil Handa, boasts that the company will become the "web3 messaging platform."

What the Lines sponsors are endorsing is a vision. There is an “increasing number of people using crypto pseudonyms to buy digital currency, trade NFTs, vote on proposals, and manage treasuries. But every time someone tries to communicate with another person on this network, there's no way to know if she's talking to the right person or not.", assures one of them.

Lines strives to allow users to send wallet-to-wallet messages and join group chats based on ownership of the token. In fact, they paint a picture of a communication layer that is ambivalent about the underlying blockchains and the particular crypto wallet a person uses and that, as a result, empowers users in a wide variety of ways. They can find the owner of a particular NFT they would like to buy, for example, discover like-minded people based on the tokens they have acquired, or communicate with potential new contributors to a DAO (a sort of “group chat with bank account” , as DAOs have been called).

The question is whether enough people agree that Lines will offer the right solution. As with all messaging apps, its value will largely be determined by how many people use it. And how many people use it will determine if the startup can be associated with platforms like OpenSea.

Meanwhile the co-founders, who have yet to decide on a business model, soon they will compete with other messaging applications trying to conquer Twitter, Telegram or Discord, where most web3 conversations live today and where phishing attempts and other scams are unstoppable.

Lines ensures that it has an advantage over the others: while Sahil Handa and friends are building for web3, they have enough distance from it to build an application that both crypto natives understand, but that people newer to web3 can easily understand and use as well.

Other investors in Lines' seed round include Scalar Capital, Volt Capital, Caffeinated Capital, Consensys Mesh and many other people, including the CEO and co-founder of Figma, Dylan Field, and the entrepreneur and investor scott belsky.