Hackathon regular? A quick overview of the quietly developing Web3 mailbox track

Odaily资深作者

2022-11-02 03:40

This article is about 5373 words, reading the full article takes about 8 minutes

Starting from the off-chain and on-chain needs, analyze the necessity of Web3 mailboxes and the pros and cons of existing products.

Original source: WhoKnows DAO

In the past two years, we have seen many email service projects in the name of decentralization. It can even be said that Web3 mailboxes are about to become a frequent visitor to Web3 hackathons. As a troll who criticizes every day, in the face of this situation, it is hard not to think about what is the use of this kind of product, why so many people are rushing to make it, and what can be made. So there is this article.

image description

Data source: Statista

It can be seen that the frequent appearance of Web3 mailbox projects is not accidental. We try to make the pie bigger: if we can successfully integrate the needs of the Web2+3 scenario, this product may become a key to break through the web2 and 3-dimensional wall, engulf the shares of the traditional mailbox industry giants, and bring a new era of the Internet. era, and become one of the leaders of this new era.

We will not discuss whether the so-called pie will be realized here, but whether there is an "if". The key lies in whether users in the two scenarios of Web2 and Web3 will really pay for the so-called Web3 mailbox. In this article, we will analyze the necessity of Web3 mailboxes and the pros and cons of existing products from two aspects: off-chain requirements and on-chain requirements.

Off-chain requirements: convenience and low cost, mutual identity verification

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the dissemination of e-mail as a commercial service to the public began in the 1980s, and it has been more than forty years. Regarding off-chain needs, we might as well disassemble them into two parts for analysis: the inherent underlying needs that have remained unchanged for forty years, and the unsatisfied new needs that have emerged with the progress of the times and the development of civilization. The performance that satisfies the former needs to be maintained, and for the latter, we can try to think about whether these pain points can be solved through email chaining.

Before the invention of e-mail, people who were unable/unwilling to meet in person usually communicated by phone, letter and fax. In the following two tables, we compare these types of information transmission methods from the perspectives of users and service providers.

It can be seen that e-mail is popular all over the world, mainly due to:

Zero cost: telephone calls and faxes need to pay for communication fees, letters need to pay for postage, and standardized emails can be used for nothing;
Both speed and flexibility: letter transportation takes a long time, phone calls take up a lot of time for both parties, and emails arrive at any time, and viewing time is free;
Ease of storage and reuse: The contents of telephone calls, faxes and letters need to be preserved in the form of recordings and paper documents respectively, which have higher requirements for storage and are difficult to reuse, while the contents of emails exist as data. Therefore, not only does it not require physical storage conditions, but it can also simply retrieve content and reuse content;
Support group sending: E-mail can send content to multiple people at the same time under one operation, and several other services do not have this function;
Identity privacy: Email can be used as a port to connect to different services. Users no longer need to remember the ID and password of each platform, and only need to "log in with email". At the same time, compared with the phone that can also be used as an interface, since multiple accounts can be registered without revealing personal information, it has stronger privacy and a higher degree of adaptation to Internet services.

From the perspective of service providers, several benefits of e-mail are complementary, and all advantages point to the reuse of user data, which happens to be the biggest reason why operators are willing to provide standardized e-mail services for free:

High Continuity: Communication using e-mail is usually back and forth. When a user sends an email to another user using his or her Gmail address, when the other user tries to reply, they will most likely choose to send it to the Gmail email address. Compared with telephone and fax, it is less difficult for email service providers to crawl user behavior and social data;
High homogeneity: At the beginning of the invention, users can only communicate with other users who use the same service operator as themselves. With the continuous expansion of cross-operator communication needs, mailbox services have gradually evolved from being unable to communicate across operators to supporting non-standardized cross-operator communication, and then developed a standardized communication protocol that has been used to this day: Unix-based computer UUCP that can communicate with each other, SMTP that can run on TCP/IP, and protocols POP and IMAP for reading e-mail. Although there are countless providers of e-mail services, standard e-mail itself is seriously homogenized. For a highly homogenized and free service, it is difficult for its users to choose to change service providers because of the pursuit of the service itself;
High dependence: The dependence on e-mail services stems from extremely high replacement costs, and the so-called replacement costs stem from the function of e-mail as identity authentication. Once a user fills in a certain email address in their personal information, or uses a certain email address to register for some platform services, if they want to change their email address, it means that they need to find all the services they still want to maintain in the future , and replace the email addresses one by one. Under the premise of serious email homogeneity, users usually do more harm than good;
Obtain user data: analyze user behavior habits through email sending and receiving records and behavior data obtained when it is used as a login interface;
Gathering customer effect: use mailboxes as the entrance to promote the entire ecology to users. Such as Google ecology, Yahoo ecology, Tencent ecology, etc.;

So far, we have a general understanding of the advantages of email compared to similar solutions when it was invented: convenience, identity verification, and no money. Next, let's take a look at how e-mail, a product of the last era, survives in the cracks of the rapid popularization of instant messaging software in today's society.

In instant messaging software, information is classified according to the chat object and displayed in the chat room with each friend, which tries to highlight the "communication object"; while e-mail will separate each email separately, and each Display the title, which pays more attention to the "communication content". Instant messaging software pays more attention to the quantity of information, while email pays more attention to the quality of information. So far, the division of labor between email and instant messaging software has been very clear. Email is suitable for important and serious matters; instant messaging software is more suitable for daily communication.

At this point, we've seen how e-mail survives. So, where are the pain points of users? The product design of email seems to be perfect, and in fact it is very close to perfect, so it can last for decades, but it still has 3 main pain points:

Information Leakage: Email content can be monitored/peeked by the service provider. In order to solve this problem, many scholars and institutions have conducted a lot of research on the mail transmission system based on quantum communication, and now there is a clear solution;
Loss of Information: The Service Provider may cease to provide the Service at any time. As mentioned above, what operators are trying to exchange for by providing free email services is user data and ecological promotion. Since users do not need to have many email addresses, the first-mover advantage of such services is obvious. More than 70% of email service providers Choose to shut down during operation. At the same time, it is not uncommon for users to be suddenly deactivated without violating any regulations. Since the current mainstream email service providers usually retain control over the user's email account, the user cannot restore the service by migrating the email address, etc., and can only accept it passively;
image description

Data source: Statista

At this point, we have seen the unresolved problems of traditional email services. These issues may not be very important to C-end users. There are not many people who think about what to do if Google closes down their e-mail every day. In the email service market, the C-end is the big head, so if you want to seize the traditional mailbox market share by solving such problems, it is basically equivalent to nonsense at the current stage. So, is there any suitable on-chain demand that needs to be solved by using mailboxes?

On-Chain Needs: Personal Sovereignty and Encrypted Communications

Based on the narrative of Web3, the functions of email products mainly include the following points:

Cost-free communication: Cost-free communication includes two aspects. One is that the platform has no threshold and no fees, and the other is that it can realize encrypted conversations between private keys without paying Gas Fee;
Communication channel integration: As mentioned above, one of the most powerful points of e-mail is the interoperability between different platforms brought about by a high degree of standardization. Therefore, it is very important whether Web3 e-mail can realize the standardization of e-mail, and at the same time support the information transmission between private key-private key, private key-email address, and e-mail address-email address;
Identity proof: Similar to traditional mailboxes that can be used as login interfaces, Web3 mailboxes can also be used as DIDs. In order to make personal information accurate and tamper-proof, it is necessary to ensure the uniqueness, non-transferability and high combinability of the email address;
Asset delivery: Support asset delivery on the chain using mail as the medium;
Directed dissemination: Use on-chain and off-chain data to filter out email addresses with certain characteristics (such as holding specific assets), and send mass emails.

When considering this part of the requirements, we have to think about two points:

How to Choose the Right Encrypted Transmission Technology Solution
How to balance privacy, efficiency, and cost

With this as a reference, let's compare several mail products that have already been tested in the current market.

Item comparison

Dmail

The main function:

NFTized email address = fee
NFTized mail
Web2+3 sending and receiving emails
Mass sending
Asset transfer on the chain
Email address (NFT) for login

Technical solutions:

Network: I chose Dfinity ICP (Internet Computer) instead of the mainstream public chain/L2. The reason is that there is no need to pay Gas, and the second is that ICP itself is optimistic about its scalability and interoperability
Contract: Written in Rust language, based on the RFC8555 protocol, a unique standard protocol has been developed
Virtual machine: adopts the WASM coding standard, supports multiple languages, and improves data security and performance while reducing costs
Send: SMTP = clear text
Connecting on-chain and off-chain: A new standard based on MIME is under development

Demand trade-off:

Introduce the DAO governance model to achieve decentralized management (and ensure the continuity of services)
ICP's core technologies, VRF and BLS, can already ensure speed and data security; on top of this, Dmail manages user information separately and enhances scalability, as shown in the figure:
The title is stored on-chain as a hash
The content and attachments are divided into several parts and stored in the exclusive storage tank assigned to each user when obtaining the email account
Privacy = Efficiency > Cost

Main pain points:

Compared with competing products of web3 mailboxes, due to the need to purchase email address NFTs, the entry cost is higher
The mechanism of assigning storage tanks to each user will cause the storage cost to increase linearly with the number of users
NFT can be transferred, which means that the email address can be transferred

Mail3

The main function:

ENS as email address = free
Multi-chain interoperability
spam filtering
Web2+3 sending and receiving emails
Mass sending
Email addresses as the underlying social protocol

Technical solutions:

Network: DCN (Data Communication Network), an evolved version of IPFS, provides distributed data storage and access services to ensure data availability
Send: SMTP = clear text
Connect on-chain and off-chain: connect to traditional email systems through LMPS, users on-chain and off-chain share encryption structures based on OpenPGP and S/MIME

Demand trade-off:

Introduce the DAO governance model to achieve decentralized management (and ensure the continuity of services)
Semi-permanent storage based on IPFS
Efficiency = Cost > Privacy

Main pain points:

ENS as an email address will cause the email address to become a semi-permanent property. After the ENS expires, you will no longer be able to receive emails

Skiff Mail

The main function:

Support Email Address / Wallet Registration = Free
end-to-end encryption
Web2+3 sending and receiving emails
Mass sending
Ecological interoperability with Skiff
2FA
Collaborate on shared documents

Technical solutions:

Introduce a public key for long-term signatures and a public key for medium- and long-term encryption, both of which correspond to private keys generated using the Curve25519 protocol
Use tweetnacl-js as encryption library for public key encryption
When A sends mail/shared files to B, a random symmetric key is automatically generated, and this key is encrypted with the encrypted public key of A and B
IPFS semi-permanent storage
Demand trade-off:
Safety > Efficiency = Cost

Main pain points:

There is a fee to increase storage and save time for editing history

MetaMail

The main function:

No threshold use = free
ENS can be used as an email address
Encrypted transmission of email content
Web2+3 sending and receiving emails
Mass sending

Technical solutions:

Send: SMTP + private key encryption / public key end-to-end encryption (when the recipient is a MetaMail address)

Demand trade-off:

Administrators keep users' private keys for email encryption
Cost > Efficiency > Safety

Main pain points:

Does not support attachment encryption, security issues
The platform side can check emails, security issues
High signature frequency, inconvenient

EtherMail

The main function:

Login with wallet = free
The ToB function is relatively rich, and it comes with a regularly updated mailbox list and packet sending system based on on-chain data
Custom Spam Filtering = Advertisement 2Earn, Subscription 2Earn

Technical solutions:

With the Thor protocol, users can choose to authorize the platform to access the private key, or not;
Store the key on the blockchain to ensure its security;

Demand trade-off: