Today, there are over 4.37 billion email users and 5.6 billion active phone numbers on the planet, making email and SMS marketing the most effective engagement channels for the vast majority of consumer brands. 

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For web3 brands, though, this is an entirely different story. Their customers are pseudonymous (or anonymous) wallet addresses and they have no way of communicating with them. I believe this is the most fundamental challenge for every business building in the web3 space. 

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You cannot build a durable, sustainable business without being able to talk to your customers. 

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We are also seeing a major evolution in consumer demand for greater ownership, interoperability, trust, and privacy — both in web3 and web2. If you couple those challenges together, you can see why a web3 messaging layer needs to exist in the world.

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The need for web3 communication has been so dire, that we’ve been using unconventional, ineffective methods to still attempt to communicate between wallets: 

• Airdropping spam NFTs 
• Sending messages that are never seen on centralized platforms
• Spamming X (fka Twitter)  
• Discord DMs

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Several companies are tackling this problem to create a web3-native way of communicating and messaging, which we termed “wallet messaging”.

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Our partner, XMTP, has become the early dominant player, bolstered by their partnership with Coinbase and the launch of the Coinbase Wallet Inbox in July 2023. With the advent of this new technology, business and marketing use cases have also emerged, giving marketers the first opportunity to reach any wallet directly with marketing platforms like Holder.

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Given this momentum, our team set out to conduct the first comprehensive research study around wallet messaging in our inaugural State of Wallet Messaging. Our research surveyed nearly 200 B2C marketers to develop a benchmark around wallet messaging familiarity, goals, interest, value, and effectiveness.

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Today, we’re sharing all of our findings and analysis with the world in the hopes that you can use this in your own marketing strategy and can learn from others in their approach to wallet messaging.

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After all our research was complete, we partnered with our friends at XMTP Labs and Airstack to produce and promote this report. Their teams are incredible and we couldn’t be more excited to have their support in this endeavor. 

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If you’re unfamiliar, XMTP is a secure messaging protocol and decentralized communication network for web3. XMTP messaging is supported by all XMTP-enabled applications, including Coinbase Wallet, Orb, Hey, Converse, Unstoppable Domains, Snapshot, Holder, and many more — many of which contributed quotes or feedback on this study as well. 

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You can see some of the results in an interactive way here.

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If you want to learn more about how Holder can help in your messaging programs or want to discuss the data in more detail, feel free to get in touch.

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We plan to keep producing and publishing research and data around the XMTP ecosystem and wallet messaging as a new, web3-native marketing channel. Text ‘join’ to walletmessaging.eth on any XMTP-enabled inbox to sign up for updates on future research reports from Holder.

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