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Grill.chat, a chat app powered by the Subsocial network, now supports Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) wallet compatibility, allowing users to chat using their Ethereum IDs and send cryptocurrency to each other via Polygon, according to a June 7 announcement .
Subsocial is a Polkadot parachain designed for social media applications.
Grill.chat allows users to participate in more than 70 chat rooms, mostly focused on crypto related topics. The development team is committed to attracting new Web3 projects to build their communities on the platform.
The integration means that users can now connect their Subsocial wallets to their EVM wallets by signing a transaction proving they are the owner of the wallet. This eliminates the need for them to hold SUB tokens to donate to other users and allows them to verify their Ethereum identity to users in chats. In the future, developers plan to use this integration to allow other users to show collections of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Subsocial CEO Zachary Edwards stated that Grill.chat is targeting cryptocurrency projects as potential chat sponsors. Nowadays, many cryptocurrency communities are built around Discord servers and Telegram channels. These channels cannot be integrated into the developer’s website, meaning that users need to download a separate program in order to join or interact with the community, creating what Edwards sees as unnecessary friction for users.
On the contrary, chat groups on Grill.chat can be integrated into the website of the development team or into the interface of the application. Edwards pointed to the example of Zeitgeist, a blockchain-based prediction market app. Its interface has a “chat” icon that opens directly into the Zeitgeist chat on Grill.chat.
However, app users have previously encountered controversy from a different source, Edwards said. Many of the largest cryptocurrency projects are on EVM-based networks such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. Cryptocurrency users are accustomed to using wallets from these networks and it is not necessary to download a new wallet to use the chat app.
Related: Decentralized social networks: the next big thing in cryptocurrency?
To partially solve this problem, the team implemented a feature that allows users to create a Subsocial wallet right from the application interface. They also paid users for gas using a smart contract that can delegate signing rights for a limited number of functions.
But this still didn’t solve the problem completely as it identified the Ethereum user from his Grill.chat messages. Edwards explained that the team implemented EVM compatibility to make it easier for Ethereum users to switch to the application.
“The cool thing is that it kind of uses offline signing technology, because at the end of the day, everything runs on Substrate [технология парачейна Polkadot], and EVM wallets are incompatible with Substrate,” Edwards said. “But we can still link the two accounts together so you can communicate on the substrate chain, but your EVM account is linked so you can have an identity, donations, NFTs and all.”
Grill.chat is not the only social media app trying to get crypto projects involved in building communities on it. OpenChat is a chat application on the Internet computer network. His team told Cointelegraph that they are working on a similar feature to display OpenChat chats on the project’s website.
The Web3 companies are aiming to create a blockchain-based social media application that will be mainstreamed. On April 26, the Polygon-powered Lens network announced a new scaling solution that it says will enable “instant publishing.” On the same day, MeWe announced that it would move 20 million of its users to the Polkadot Frequency parachain network.