EtherMail: Reimagining Email for Web3
Emails are a fundamental part of our daily lives, but the underlying infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose in today’s privacy-centric landscape; as we move into the Web3 era, there is a massive opportunity to improve on the current status quo by building solutions and tools at the intersection of Web3 and email. On one hand, cryptography popularised via Web3 can improve on traditional email practices around privacy, and on the other hand, the Web3 industry sorely needs a Web3 native communication system. We firmly believe EtherMail will become the communication platform of choice for Web3 users moving forward.
Email improved with Web3
Cryptocurrencies rely on cryptography, which predates even Bitcoin to encrypt data: public-private key encryption. This technology can also be used to encrypt emails while making communication more secure. Public-private key encryption has become increasingly popular with instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal. Moreover, privacy-focused email clients like ProtonMail are successfully selling the service at a premium for end-to-end encrypted emails, though adoption levels remain relatively low. In the near future we may indeed see a much higher percentage of emails being sent privately using end-to-end encryption, thanks to Web3 popularising private key management.
For many users, migrating from familiar, easy to use tools such as Gmail or Apple mail to alternative technology solutions could be perceived as an unnecessary administrative headache — even when the new technology is streets ahead of the legacy platforms. This is the lock-in effect in action.
Interestingly, with the rise of cryptocurrency, many more users are now familiar with encryption & cryptography, and have a broader appreciation around the importance of privacy. There is now an ever increasing subset of the population who have taken the leap to self-custody their digital assets. By doing so they are already securing a private key that could also be used to encrypt / decrypt emails with peer-to-peer encryption. Therefore, the adoption of peer-to-peer email encryption will increase, with more users having secure self custody of a private key.
Constructing tools to leverage the infrastructure already built for securing digital assets, and adapting this to email, has far-reaching potential benefits across society.
Although this is an important part of our investment thesis for EtherMail, we also believe that this is a longer-term objective for the company as today the number of ‘crypto users’ is still too small to have a widely adopted generalized email solution. However, it will inevitably be on the roadmap in the near future. Until then, the low hanging fruit is to build an email solution for Web3.
In the Web3 world, users are pseudonymous. Their address is public, and so are their digital asset holdings, but it is impossible to know who they are and there is no easy way to communicate directly with them.
For several years, this was not a problem, as there weren’t many use cases that could benefit from a communication system anyway. Since then, useful decentralized applications have gained popularity; mainly in the financial sector and in the gaming/NFT sector, where communicating with users is of paramount importance. For example, NFT investors may want to communicate directly and privately with a holder of an NFT they would like to acquire, without publicly bidding for it. Another example could be DeFi applications who may want to alert their users or inform them about governance decisions, vulnerabilities, or share general updates.
Thanks to EtherMail, it is now possible to send emails to a public Ethereum address and it would be trivial to email all holders of a given cryptocurrency, such as all AAVE holders, to inform them about an AAVE governance proposal to vote on. The challenge is not so much around what kind of information could be relayed, but whether users will see the need to go through the effort of setting up their EtherMail account and checking to see if they have (Ether)mail.
Solutions like ENS, Ethereum Naming System, give expression to the ongoing maturation of the Web3 industry and that the potential for additional use cases to emerge that support users who don’t want to be pseudonymous. As the importance of our Web3 identity becomes more pronounced, we will need a robust Web3 communication system.
Early adopters could be projects building in the space, e.g. DAOs, looking for a decentralized login system to give secure access to their files or collaboration software. It could be a way to contact and hire people. It could also be a way to purchase a subscription to a sovereign Web3 newsletter, being sent to all token holders. The use cases are as broad as the existing use cases for email, so whilst we do not know which application will be the first to gain adoption, it is fairly clear that if the user experience is good, there will be early adopters, which can help the service to grow into a credible solution to serve the needs of an entire industry.
The low hanging fruit is a tool for Web3 marketing communication, a sort of Mailchimp for Web3 where projects need to contact users but, since these users do not sign in with an email, they have no single communication channel with them. Instead, they currently rely on multiple tools (Twitter, Discord, Telegram being the main three) where there is both an overlap of users across the channels, and equally some users on none of these at all. Furthermore, these channels are generally very noisy and important information can easily be missed. The thesis is that EtherMail will assist in consolidating communication under one proven platform: emails.
The most obvious challenge to build a product like this is spam prevention, given the addresses and therefore the emails are public. Of course the content of the emails are not public, but it could make the lives of malicious users easier by knowing who to target for phishing. EtherMail has already been building some very interesting spam prevention mechanisms, to be unveiled very soon.
We look forward to working with Shant, Gerald and the entire EtherMail team on building the Web3 communication channel!
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