Messaging Apps Aren’t Just About Messaging Anymore
The days of messaging services that are just messaging services are long gone. Facebook Messenger isn’t just a chat app, but a platform for managing events, playing games, sharing GIFs, communicating location, sending money, and making voice and video calls. Google Hangouts is a similarly diverse and dynamic messaging space, full of far more applications than plain text chats.
Messaging apps are stepping up their game in part because they must compete with other social media platforms that integrate chats into their existing capabilities, such as Twitter’s DM platform, Snapchat’s visual and video-heavy messaging tools, and Slack’s integration of workplace coordination and content sharing with private and group chat capabilities. As established messaging apps vie with each other for shares of the public market and up-and-coming apps strive to gain prominence, the vast majority of them seem to have realized that users expect more than just messaging in their messaging apps. Telegram, a favorite messaging app in the tech startup world, is reportedly using funds raised from their high-profile private token sale to finance an elaborate blockchain-based ecosystem built on top of their existing messaging app. That ecosystem will reportedly feature distributed file storage, centralized VPN and secure browsing services, decentralized apps, and peer-to-peer payment options. Telegram may be one of the earlier companies to bring blockchain to messaging apps, but they assuredly won’t be the last.
The Promise and Pitfalls of DApps
The Ethereum platform centrally features smart contracts, programs built into blockchain to automatically carry out specific actions in certain situations. Developers can use smart contracts in Ethereum and similar blockchains to make DApps (decentralized applications). Developers and users deploy and run DApps run on a decentralized blockchain network rather than a central backend code source. DApps can carry out a diverse array of actions just like standard computer applications, but they feature increased accessibility thanks to the decentralized, networked structure of blockchain; enhanced security and reliability thanks to blockchain’s immutable transaction ledger; and higher efficiency thanks to automation conducted using that transaction ledger.
Developers have gotten lots of practice building DApps on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), but Ethereum’s popularity is proving to be its undoing. Accessing the EVM requires native tokens called Ether, and blockchain pundits predict that Ether’s value could eventually exceed bitcoin’s. This is good news for Ether investors but bad news for developers who need to spend it on making apps. The entire Ethereum network has also struggled with scalability issues, falling victim to the same popularity-related bottlenecks that caused bitcoin transactions to take a better part of a day at some points in late 2017. Late December transactions in the Ethereum-based CryptoKitties DApp (a virtual game) were so prolific that unrelated DApps’ performances faltered as the network struggled to keep up.
What Will Messaging DApps Do?
DApps could unlock many messaging utilities currently troublesome or impossible to execute with traditional computer applications. One of the most exciting new developments in the messaging world is the increased prominence and sophistication of AI chatbots, and DApps have plenty to offer them.
Amazon hopes that its AI home assistant Alexa will become an increasingly sophisticated tool in its users’ lives as AI tech improves and Alexa becomes finely attuned to each user’s needs. Alexa can order supplies, look up directions, confirm plans, and otherwise serve as a virtual assistant. Chatbots can do the same. Users could eventually use their messaging app to talk to a virtual assistant that helps them book flights, manage their schedule, and carry out other tasks.
Actions carried out by the virtual assistant wouldn’t have to be aided by a customer service worker or a travel agent on the other end of the transaction. Instead, they could execute a user demand, such as opening a flight calendar, using DApps. DApps use blockchain to create the efficiency and reliability that can handle the complex data and processing needs of interactions between users, AI chatbots, and third-party in-app services.
DApps and blockchain capabilities could also substantially increase the security of messaging apps. A 2015 survey of employees in finance, healthcare, legal services, and other sectors that deal in highly sensitive information found that employees often used consumer-grade messaging apps to chat about company matters, even though those apps didn’t meet industry-appropriate encryption and security standards. Blockchain’s immutable ledger renders blockchain transactions and the DApps built on top of them highly secure. Tampering with blockchain transaction histories is difficult or impossible. DApps could provide safe messaging utilities for companies who need it, as well as for everyday privacy-conscious users.
Solving blockchain scalability will be essential to launching DApps on messenger services. Messaging service WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly active users, while Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion and WeChat has 1.0 billion. Ethereum and most other DApp-enabled blockchains aren’t ready for an ecosystem of this size, but some new blockchain startups are launching protocols that could significantly enhance scalability while maintaining security. Dispatch Labs uses a blockchain protocol that uses decentralized blockchain ledgers to securely manage off-chain data artifacts. This network is significantly scalable both because it avoids on-chain data bloat and because of Dispatch’s Delegated Asynchronous Proof of Stake consensus protocol. Developers can build DApps in the Dispatch Virtual Machine. Dispatch DApps might be the first truly messaging-ready DApps.
Messaging apps need to offer meaningful utility to users to outperform competitors. Blockchain provides a basis for building DApps and other next-generation messaging app capabilities, and Dispatch has produced the first blockchain protocol that could genuinely allow wide scale blockchain deployment.
