Dialect Raises $4.1M to Bring ‘Smart Messaging’ to Solana

Dialect, a new Solana protocol aiming to solve key Web 3 usability issues, announced Tuesday a $4.1 million seed round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto.

The “smart messaging” platform launched on Solana mainnet this week to bring actionable notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat to Web 3 apps. It joins a crop of projects, mostly on Ethereum to date, that are trying to bring a user-friendly stalwart of the Web 2 world – notifications – to the realm of Web 3.

From emails and follow requests to stock price fluctuations and Slack messages, we’re used to Web 2 apps alerting us to new information right when it becomes available. In Web 3, push notifications have been difficult to implement without the help of services like Dialect, which will monitor on-chain activity and send alerts directly to a mobile device associated with a crypto wallet.

At launch, Dialect’s tools will help Web 3 developers send out notifications automatically triggered by on-chain events.

Say you bid on an NFT through a decentralized marketplace. Today, you use your wallet to “sign in” to Web 3 apps, and since most Web 3 wallets are browser-based you’ll need to pull out your computer each time you want to check whether you’ve been outbid.

Dialect CEO Chris Osborn told Coindesk that his thesis is “to build products that are delightful in ways to end consumers that haven't been true in Web 2.” Since notifications sent using Dialect will be tied directly to a user’s Solana wallet, they can be embedded with actions that communicate directly with the blockchain. In Osborn’s telling, this will mark a major improvement in Web 3 convenience.

Read more: EPNS Goes Live in Bid to Bring Notifications to Web 3

“Say some proposal gets announced [for a DAO] and I get a notification telling me ‘Hey, this proposal has been submitted by this wallet,’” Osborn explained. “You can read [the proposal] right there in the message. But right there are also the ‘pass,’ ‘like,’ ‘accept,’ or ‘reject’ [options] right in the notification.”

In addition to push notifications, the Dialect team is particularly excited about a tool that helps developers build wallet-to-wallet chat into their Web 3 apps. Like Dialect’s notifications, messages sent using Dialect can be embedded with actions or live information directly pulled from the blockchain.