A Brief Analysis of Jabber: Should Online Chat be Fully On-Chain in the Web3 Era?

Author: Lu Chang

Source: Rhythm Research Institute

On-chain not only records transactions, but each transaction can also be accompanied by custom text. With this simplest and most basic functionality, people can do many interesting things. A simple example is on-chain chatting. Previously, Rhythm had written about the use of Ethereum for transmitting messages; for details, see “Actually, Many People Are Using Ethereum to Chat”.

However, due to the characteristics of the Ethereum network itself, the gas fees for on-chain transactions are high. Although some people are using Ethereum for chatting, this method of use is difficult to popularize. How many users are willing to pay ten dollars to send a message?

Blockchain chatting is indeed an interesting idea, but it seems unfeasible on Ethereum. What if we use another network? Jabber, built on Solana, is attempting to put this interesting concept into practice.

At the end of November, Jabber launched the beta version of its app. Jabber is a "Telegram-like" chat app, and its interesting aspect is that each message is a transaction sent on the Solana chain. Benefiting from Solana's high performance and low cost, sending messages as transactions does not impose an unbearable cost on users.

（Jabber main interface）

When we enter the main interface, a clean chat list is presented, and the basic operational logic is not significantly different from Telegram. Users need to click the write button in the upper right corner and enter the recipient's address to start chatting. In addition to standard wallet addresses, the app also supports .sol domain names.

（Enter address and send message）

In addition to peer-to-peer chatting, the app also supports tipping, creating group chats, and paid message reception. Paid message reception is one of the more novel designs.

Due to the permissionless nature of on-chain information transmission, anyone can send any message as long as they know the address. Imagine a scenario where Jabber becomes as widely popular as WeChat, and you happen to be a KOL whose address is public; how much spam would your chat list be filled with?

（Settings interface）

The issue is resolved through the paid message reception feature. In the settings interface, we see the item "SOL per message," which represents how much SOL needs to be paid to you for each message sent. This design is quite interesting.

（Group chat interface）

A similar mechanism exists in group chats, where users must pay a certain amount of SOL to send messages after joining a group. This mechanism can create more use cases, such as paid communities and online Q&A sessions. However, there are currently no similar mechanisms in Web2 counterparts. Whether this demand can generate real use cases remains to be seen.

（When creating a group, you can set the price for sending messages within the group）

The fundamental difference between this app and other chat software is that all data is transmitted on-chain. This is also the biggest concern for users: how to ensure the privacy of chat content when on-chain data is public and transparent?

We demonstrate with real usage. The author used Jabber to send the characters "GM" to a certain address, and this transaction incurred a gas fee of 0.000005 SOL.

In the log details of this transfer, we can see some more detailed content.

Although Jabber puts all information on-chain, the messages are encrypted and will not make your chat content public, so users need not worry about privacy breaches due to all data being on-chain.

However, the drawbacks of being fully on-chain are also evident; it is inevitable to pay a certain amount of gas for each operation. After multiple attempts, it can be observed that modifying personal information, changing profile pictures, and setting whether to display SOL domain names, etc., almost every operation in the settings requires on-chain interaction and incurs gas fees. In actual chat processes, sending different amounts of characters incurs the same gas fee, which is the same as the gas required for changing various settings, all being 0.000005.

（Messages with different character counts and different operations all have the same gas fee）

Jabber is developed by the Bonfida team, and currently, there is no independent official website. It is available for both iOS and Android versions. Bonfida is a complete product suite built on Solana, with its flagship product being a DEX front end based on the Serum central order book. Currently, the functionalities provided by Bonfida include not only basic trading features based on Serum but also programmatic trading bots, Serum API, Solana on-chain perpetual contract protocols, and SOL domain names.

Jabber is the first mobile messaging application built on Solana. Bonfida believes that Jabber's most important value lies in providing users with a trustless, decentralized way to monetize their interactions. This feature may bring more use cases for NFTs and GameFi. (However, Bonfida did not elaborate on how this feature should be applied to GameFi and NFTs.)