Hello everyone. With 2021 in hindsight, we’re excited to share our progress and outlook for 2022 as we work on delivering our first big milestone in Q1.
tl;dr: Our SDK is going live in Q1 and we want our investors to get a first look at building on top of XMTP, and giving us feedback.
Current tagline
XMTP is the web3 communication network, enabling messaging between wallets.
Financials
- Cash in bank: $24M
- Current burn target: $250k/mo
- Runway at current burn: 78 months
- Team size: 9
Updates
- We’re updating our company name to “XMTP Labs” to create a distinction between the corporate entity and the soon-to-be open source project XMTP
- We will split this distinction further by launching xmtp.org, dedicated to the project
- We will continue to use xmtp.com for our corporate entity
- We’ve given ourselves a target of Q1 to release our SDK privately to a set of developers to build messaging experiences on
- Specifically we’re targeting a mid-to-late February release
- We’ve put together an SDK spec doc that is currently being reviewed by a number of developers and we’ve received some fantastic feedback so far
- If you want to review the SDK, have a look below at Asks
- The XMTP Lightpaper is at a draft stage and is being reviewed internally with the team
- We will be opening it for more feedback next week
- We’ve been honing our strategy and initial release to a point where we feel confident in what we’ll be publishing publicly in our Litepaper, SDK, and open source code
- The SDK is our primary touch point with developers—the toolset they need to build messaging apps
- We’ll release a reference app a bit later that will allow anyone to start sending and receiving messages
- Much of our messaging will be around the concept of a unified inbox
- This is to get away from today’s fragmentation that we see in the messaging landscape (every app and website have their own inboxes, inaccessible to each other)
- All of the apps and experiences being built on XMTP would be able to tap into the same set of messages
- A portable, unified inbox would help the apps feel more connected and less like walled gardens, with users always able to get at the entirety of their inbox regardless of their touchpoint
- The SDK is our primary touch point with developers—the toolset they need to build messaging apps
- There have been a number of projects launched in recent months around web3 messaging. A few notes about them:
- In the case of Inb0x and Rarible’s messaging, they’ve been built using centralized databases that are only accessible to their individual project
- Each inbox is fragmented, so your messages only show up in the individual apps where they were sent
- We’ve been in touch with some of these teams to talk about eventually swapping out their back end with XMTP to tap into the unified inbox
- More of these will inevitably be built—if you happen to see any like this we’ll be happy to get in touch with their team to bring our decentralized solution into it
- Projects like bottle.to and notifi.xyz pull messages that are encoded within Ethereum transactions sent directly on-chain
- This is really cool, but wouldn’t scale in the least to the kinds of use cases that the space is in need of
- In the case of Inb0x and Rarible’s messaging, they’ve been built using centralized databases that are only accessible to their individual project
Asks
- Every couple of weeks we host a Twitter Space where our team interviews someone from the community. Tomorrow we’re hosting Brantly Millegan of ENS and we’d love for you to join us.
- Also, a retweet to help promote would be awesome.
- As we begin to work on the $XMTP token (supply, staking, usage, governance, risk, etc.) we’d love to collaborate with anyone who has had experience in consensus mechanisms and tokenomics
- We’re currently on the hunt for a VP of Engineering to lead our development team here. If you happen to know of anyone that is looking to jump ship from Web 2.0 to web3 let us know.
- For any of our investors that would like to look at our SDK, we’d love to get your feedback.
- More specifically we’re looking for feedback from Dapps/Protocols that want to send transactional messages to their token holders (Governance, Transactions, Changes in token, etc), Communities who want to communicate based on what they hold (Ex. ENS), other projects that want to reach all of their NFT holders.
- We would like to have a handful of our investors (10 or so) review and provide critical feedback on our Lightpaper before we publish it publicly in February
- If you would like to review it, please let me know.
- Do note that we’ll be going through a few rounds of feedback to tighten things up before publish, so we would ask that whoever is interested in reviewing be able to follow us through through a couple of weeks of feedback
- We’ll be publishing a big set of new roles (including the VP of Eng above) that we’d love to get some distribution on