Backstory
The Problem
In the summer of 2021, I had journeyed to the bottom of the crypto-trading rabbit hole. My screen time had skyrocketed from months prior and I was constantly checking my phone, lending, swapping, staking, bridging, buying, and selling.
Crypto trading and the firehose of information shared about it on Crypto Twitter, where everyone goes to follow news, evolved at a breakneck speed. Every day, I felt like I learned more but knew less. Though I couldn’t get enough, what I took away is that much of crypto trading operates in complete and utter chaos.
For one, following your blockchain transactions when trading can be difficult and stressful. It’s easy to start sweating when you sign a transaction on Ethereum, receive an “n transactions completed” message, and then find no funds where you’d expect to see them. You race over to Etherscan to try to make sense of what’s happened, and you end up with 11-tabs open and as the newest member of a 24,000-member “support” Telegram or Discord channel. Not exactly a seamless experience.
More concerning, other than NFT metadata, I wasn’t seeing many standards about what information investors had access to. There weren’t any neatly formatted research reports from my trading platforms. No commonly formatted disclosures laying out basic information about what pump and dump altcoin I was about to buy—has its GitHub been inactive for three years? Is it an inside joke? Is it a nothingburger? Anyone can buy anything, at any time, from almost anywhere. It’s incredible. Though I’m, of course, not for algorithmic stablecoins and too-good-to-be-true yields, I support much of it—particularly self-custody and owning digital assets directly. But I’m also strongly for transparency, access to information, and standards to protect investors.
Our Response
You likely don’t read the crusty prospectuses, annual reports, and proxy voting statements that come in the mail and so many of us toss in the recycling bin. But they’re important and should be available to everyone. They tell us what’s “under the hood” of our funds, IRAs, 401(k)s, and securities, how they’re performing, balance sheets, or who their management teams are. Creating them and publishing the information allows investors to make informed decisions and helps prevent a lot of garbage from entering the system.
Given the skepticism and the volatility associated with crypto, I had a vision that traditional investor communications that better explained where people were putting their money, and how it was performing, would make their way to the world of digital assets. First as a ‘nice-to-have,’ but eventually as standard, required documentation. In August of 2021, I set out to raise a seed round of financing.
While fundraising, I met Brad Katsuyama from IEX. I’d heard he was also thinking about crypto and digital assets. We immediately connected on our respective visions and how they might complement one another. We decided to partner and started building Dispatch at IEX.
What is Dispatch?
Far beyond the “traditional investor comms for crypto” product I set out to build, Dispatch is a messaging protocol that collects and distributes fees based on events that occur before, during, and after delivery. It also provides users with an ever-growing, up-to-date list of tokens and NFT projects, with all their holders indexed by ownership with advanced analytics.
And, yes, I can hear you saying, “But that’s so vague! I don’t get it. What is it quite literally that you do here?!” In non-web3 speak, we’re a router for projects and companies to send important messages and notifications. We help deliver messages to people, places, and things.
We use web2, web3, and we’ll use webN. We use http, smtp, and ftp. We use FedEx, UPS, and the USPS. Give us an email address, a physical address, or a wallet address – we’ll deliver the message and, optionally, deliver a message back from the recipient.
Who is it for?
Dispatch is built for web3 projects and web2 companies—our customers can be tokens, NFTs, DAOs, retailers, and brands. Anyone already sending or planning to send email, push notifications, SMS, letters in the mail, tweets, posts to their #announcments channel in Discord, or peer-to-peer chats. Dispatch will route the message over the appropriate rails, measure engagement—like if the message was read by the sender—and report back.
We work with blockchains, wallet providers, investors, and developers. There are several actors in any particular flow of a message. Our customers send messages, but those messages need to be delivered, rendered, and acted upon. Developers can interact with a single, cross-chain protocol instead of implementing individual SDKs, reducing code and saving time.
web3 Native
Self-custody will only grow over time. Users will not give up their personally identifiable information, but still need a way to receive communications. Dispatch provides the full list of holders for a token, which is derived from parsing the entirety of a blockchain from genesis. We index based on ownership and track changes to a wallet.
Our communities are viewable at app.dispatch.xyz. Project and company administrators can verify themselves and gain access to messaging capabilities for their communities. Once verified, communities can message their entire set of holders or a subset with timely information. They can filter members based on the actions the wallets have taken, using traits like “whale,” “dexer,” “landowner,” and over 50 more.
Version 0.1 Is Here
We’re live. We launched our pay-as-you-go MVP in June.
Token Holder Analytics
We currently support Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Binance Smart Chain. Solana is well on its way and we’re in research and development with Algorand, Tezos, and Secret. Wondering what the $MATIC community looks like? Just head to app.dispatch.xyz/ethereum/matic and take a look. You’ll find a list of wallet addresses that own Polygon.
Want to see what the $MATIC community that often swap on decentralized exchanges and have their ENS (Ethereum Name Service) set up looks like? You can filter by 😎 Dexer and 💖 ENS Lover.
On-chain Communications
How do you send a message to 0x430467c860a94991160ae40Dbaa02C48b3499cfd? There is no “mailto:” equivalent for messaging a wallet address. No SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Crypto wallets are like mini browsers; they let you see what’s stored on the blockchain associated with a particular address. Check out, for example, one of Serena Williams’ wallets.
What do you see? A bunch of NFTs. A wallet is associated with all your data on the blockchain, but NFTs are the only data type that you can see. Dispatch is building SDKs and embed libraries to make it easy for partners to render messages clearly across wallets. The Dispatch Studio is a design editor that will allow you to create a message and if that message needs to be delivered to a wallet, we’ll convert it to an NFT.
Use Cases
Why does anyone need to send a message on chain? Can’t we just leave well-enough alone and stick with web2? web3 is new and fun, and it’s true that sometimes blockchain technology is used only for those two reasons. Other times, web3 truly offers a legitimate improvement over the current way of doing something. In the case of Dispatch, it’s a more transparent way for projects initiating messages to have control over the distribution of fees and lets them know more about how users are interacting with their products.
We see enormous opportunities to improve the status quo for investor communications, customer engagement, event invites, urgent alerts, e-commerce and services for retailers, web3 marketplaces, and many other use cases for blockchain messaging.
The Team
I can’t say enough about the Dispatch team. I’d need another lengthy post to cover the talent of our team. Here we are below. And these are our team NFTs.
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What’s Next
We’re at work building the 1.0 release of the protocol. One which supports staking, fee distributions, reputation scores, and engagement measurements. We’ll go hard in the paint on dynamic, interactive, and responsive NFTs, and we plan to add support for private 1:1 messaging.
We can’t wait to change blockchain messaging with Dispatch and help provide users with the access and insights they need. We’ll see you at one of the 327 crypto conferences coming up in the next few weeks and look forward to knowing you.
Byron