Grill.chat, a chat app based on the Subsocial network, has now implemented support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) wallet, allowing users to chat using their Ethereum identities and send each other crypto via Polygon, according to a June 7 announcement.
Subsocial is a Polkadot parachute designed for social media applications.
Grill.chat allows users to participate in more than 70 chat rooms focused primarily on crypto-related topics. The development team seeks to attract 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 to verify ownership of the wallet. This prevents them from needing to own SUB tokens to donate to other users and allows them to prove their Ethereum identities to users in chat rooms. In the future, the developers plan to use this integration to allow non-fungible token (NFT) collections to be displayed to other users.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Subsocial CEO Zachary Edwards stated that Grill.chat is targeting crypto projects as potential chat room sponsors. Currently, many crypto communities are built around Discord servers and Telegram channels. These channels cannot be integrated into the developer’s website, which means users must load a separate program to join or interact with the community, creating what Edwards considers unnecessary friction for users.
By contrast, the group chats on Grill.chat can be integrated into a development team’s website or app interface. Edwards pointed to the example of Zeitgeist, a blockchain-based prediction trading app. His interface features a “chat” icon that opens directly to a Zeitgeist chat room at Grill.chat.
However, users of the app previously encountered friction from another source, Edwards said. Many of the largest crypto projects are on EVM-based networks, such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. Cryptocurrency users are used to using wallets from these networks and don’t necessarily want to download a new wallet to use a chat app.
Related: Decentralized Social Networks: The Next Big Thing in Crypto?
To partially resolve this issue, the team implemented a feature that allows users to create a Subsocial wallet directly from the app’s interface. They also paid users’ gas fees through a smart contract that can delegate signing privileges for a limited number of functions.
But this still didn’t fully resolve the issue, as it isolated the user’s Ethereum identity from their Grill.chat posts. The team implemented EVM support to make it easier for Ethereum users to switch to the app, Edwards explained.
“The cool thing is that it uses this off-chain signature technology because, at the end of the day, everything runs on Substrate (Polkadot’s parachute technology) and EVM wallets don’t support Substrate,” Edwards stated. “But we can still connect those two accounts so you can chat on the substrate chain, but your EVM account is linked, so you can have identity, donations, NFTs, all these kinds of things.”
Grill.chat is not the only social media app trying to attract crypto projects to build communities on it. OpenChat is a chat application on the Internet computer network. His team told Cointelegraph that it is working on a similar feature to display OpenChat chat rooms on a project website.
Web3 companies are racing to create a blockchain-based social media application that will see mass adoption. On April 26, the Polygon-based Lens network announced a new scaling solution that it said would enable “instant posts.” On the same day, MeWe said it would move its 20 million users to Polkadot’s parachute network, Frequency.
