A Comprehensive Deep Dive into Dialect
A Comprehensive Deep Dive into Dialect
Enabling web3 mass adoption with interconnectivity and usability 🗣️
Heading into the web3 world in 2023 is all buzzing and bright with new technologies like Interoperability protocols, Metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, Appchains, Oracles, DEXs, etc. All the upcoming web3 companies and platforms are getting record funding, everything looks so great!
But there is a major problem looming in the web3 ecosystem for a long time now
“Interconnectivity and Simple Usability Experience for Users“
Both these factors are prime reasons for the lack of mass adoption of web3 protocols primarily in non-crypto native users, let us try to understand this and how Dialect shows a bright light to solve this problem in the most elegant way!
When we analyze the above image we can clearly see why web3 technologies are intimidating to use for the non-crypto native community, UX elements like accounts, networks, and wallets which we see in most of the modern web3 wallets like Metamask or Phantom are not intuitive, and comprehensible for mass adoption of web3 technology.
When we compare the web3 UX with the web2 equivalent of it, Google Pay (a Google-owned product that allows users to transfer money via the Unified Payment Interface in India), the payment is very intuitive and social in nature. We can:
Pay users directly from the list of contacts.
Send payment requests to notify others.
Chat directly with any contact along with the payment facility.
A simple and elegant confirmation screen with no jargon.
The next thing which is inhibiting web3 protocols is their inability to create a unified interaction method, to interact with any protocol the user is involved with, from a single application. To put that into perspective, let us take the same example of Gpay to show how it is providing a unified interaction to complete payments for different companies and entities ranging from mobile recharges to electricity bills:
A simpler user interface that is not complex even for non-crypto natives and an interconnectivity mechanism to unify the interactions between users and various web3 protocols is the need of the hour to bring web3 to mainstream user adoption.
And DIALECT is doing exactly that but with a wider suite of features to enhance interconnectivity between dApps to the next level. It also provides an open-sourced SDK for the developers to integrate its services across other web3 applications. In this deep dive let us explore all the services proposed to be offered by the Dialect Platform and the future potential of this amazing technology.
Dialect into the act!
Dialect is a smart messaging protocol, which enables composable, and interactive messages and notifications, which allow user-to-user and protocol-to-user interaction. Dialect is made with a simple UX in mind and was built to act as a one-stop center to interact with all the notifications from protocols that the user is involved with.
Dialect was founded by Chris Osborn in 2021 and it was part of the Global Solana Hackathon, called IGNITION, where the project secured 5th place in the web3 track.
Dialect aims to enable two key territories which are lacking usable UX and interconnectivity in the web3 ecosystem, they are:
User-User Interaction (Wallet-to-Wallet communication, Transfer Crypto, and a lot of fun and cool NFT sticker thing going on, which will be explained in later sections)
Protocol-User Interaction (Dev tooling) (Composable, Interactive Notifications, Conditional Cross-Chain Alerts, Subscription models, DAO management, NFT bidding, DEX trading, and endless other tooling features)
In the next section let us explore in detail what is web3 Interconnectivity and it’s major issues that Dialect will be targeting to solve
What is web3 Interconnectivity?
Let us use an example to understand how important web3 interconnectivity is: Assume you are an avid cryptocurrency user and you are interested to place a bid for an exciting upcoming NFT. To do this you need to monitor two applications:
A Decentralized Exchange like dydx or Uniswap, to monitor your trade metrics to sell at a specific price and gain the optimal profits from the asset.
An NFT marketplace like Opensea or Rarible, to purchase the NFT you were looking for, by placing a bid.
And now what if you were really busy that day, missed making a profit, and also didn’t place a bid in the marketplace, because you are too busy to go around multiple applications and monitor them regularly.
Now if web3 was interconnected, developers could build a single application to monitor multiple dApps and notify the user in a popup alerting the user about the price and if the popup is composable and interactive with rich media text, the user can approve the transaction from the popup itself.
This is the exact thing Dialect is trying to achieve but in a much wider range, because today’s web3 ecosystem is wild, it consists of DEXs, DAOs, NFTs, etc, and Dialect is built to provide the devs required tooling to build applications and integrate Dialect services into their existing projects to provide their uses with a more interactive and simpler way to monitor and approve transactions. Hmm, lots of tools for devs, you know what it’s called? Dev tooling!
What is Dev Tooling?
Dev tooling is a set of tools and infrastructure built for developers to provide them with the required tools to build projects that enhance the adoption of any ecosystem, here when we talk about web3 as an ecosystem, there are a lot of dev tools available like:
DAO frameworks build the base of DAOs with minimum code and then configure the rules of the project.
Node management tools.
Development frameworks like Hardhat, Truffle, etc.
Oracles like Chainlink, Pyth, etc.
Data storage tools like Pinata, Arweave, etc.
Similarly, Dialect aims to provide the required dev tooling for developing things like:
Integrated alert notifications in dApps
Conditional Cross-dApp triggers
Unified Asset Management, etc.
In the next sections let us explore what are the different services offered by Dialect to enable Dev tooling for interconnectivity and User Experience Enhancement in web3.
What does Dialect offer?
As shown in the above visualization, Dialect offers a lot of dev tooling infrastructure, along with the Dialect App, which brings all the features together to give users a simple and intuitive way to enable wallet-to-wallet smart messaging to chat and transfer crypto socially!
In the next sections let us explore each of these services in depth!
Dialect Subscribe: User POV 👤
Dialect provides developers with a way to build simple user interfaces to register users by subscribing their wallets to the Organization dashboard (which will be covered in the next section). This is a much more time-efficient way for the user to go through all the important updates from the organization, rather than going through hundreds of chat and spam messages in discord servers (the ol’ web2 way :d).
To make a better analogy with web2, it is quite similar to subscribing to a Substack newsletter, where we get automated notifications about new posts from the creators.
Users can get rid of long authentication loops they face on web2 websites asking them to confirm their mail ID by entering some weird codes..Nah we don’t do that here! Just click on connect wallet and subscribe in a single click.
No more page redirects to confuse users with login or signup options.
No need to create any accounts, this helps users to stay spam free and reduce the risk of a potential leak of data like on web2 websites. Here using Dialect only the public wallet address is used to subscribe to the Organization’s updates.
Dialect Subscribe: Organization POV 📱
Community management on sites like discord and slack is a very well-paying job, but it is often not quite affordable for early startups to hire Community Managers who charge an average salary of 65K USD and can go up to 185K USD (source), and it’s common to feel an increase in the gap between the founder’s thoughts, and updates users get. Dialect solves all these problems for creators, projects, and organizations, by providing a simple dashboard to do all the following operations:
Compose a new message to all your users and send them directly to their wallet with a single click.
Analyze the audience statistics.
View message history.
The subscribe component can be directly embedded into any website and can be configured for an entire project or individual creators as well. The subscribe component can be simply added to any existing project by following these steps:
Install the required packages for rendering the subscribe component
Configure the parameters in the Subscribe component, to choose from which chain among Solana and Aptos, and which backend option DialectCloud or Solana.
Drop in <SubscribeButton /> react component and render the component on any website.
Login with the same keypair into https://dashboard.dialect.to/, compose, and send the first message to your community!
The messages can be sent via different mediums like Telegram, Email, SMS, or of course directly to the user’s wallet (which brings the much-needed simplicity to the user’s experience while interacting with various organizations).
Dialect Powered Inbox (SDK)
Dialect gives an open-sourced SDK to power dApps with an embedded inbuilt Inbox with a decentralized chat feature and also an embedded notification alert modal, which can be used to alert the users when an on-chain parameter triggers an event.
As you can see above animation, it is the working of Dialect powered notification modals on the Jet protocol dApp, warning the user about the collateral health according to the given input. The window of the notification and other data monitoring parameters can be configured using the Dialect SDK.
Feature Updates
Being a validator, developer, or core community member of a buzzing and fast-paced blockchain like Solana is not easy! Tons of new features are added and removed every day, and they need to always stay on top of them, to make changes and prevent any breaking blocks in their projects and applications. To do this they need to constantly monitor the community pages, discord, and other social outlets of Solana, which time inefficient and unorganized.
Dialect came forward and introduced a solution to this problem by developing a Solana Feature update notification and monitoring system, to help validators, developers, and core community members to stay updated, they can just sign up with their wallet and check the updates on the Dialect App (about it in the next section !)
Introducing Dialect App
In the initial phase of the launch, Dialect provided SDK for other dApps to embed the services they provide into their applications. But currently, on December 15th, 2023, Dialect launched their App live on ios exclusively.
The Dialect application provides all the Dialect services in a single place for the users:
Wallet to Wallet to Smart Messages
Composable and Interactive Notifications
NFT chat stickers
Updates from user-subscribed external dApps.
Dialect is in progress to deliver its application for Android and the team is ready to deploy the application live onto the much-hyped Solana Saga on Day 1 of its release!
Dialect is also specifically working in collaboration with Solana Mobile team to build the core SMS infrastructure, by building the default DIAL APP on the upcoming Solana Saga (a Solana blockchain based decentralized smartphone). Dialect team is extending their messaging standard to the core SMS to enable DM and Group chat directly from the Wallet on Solana Saga, Stay upto date with notifications from the subscribed dApp platforms, and approve crypto transactions right from DIAL APP. This application is also open-sourced and can be used by any other dApp out there, to further strengthen the wen3 infrastructure.
In the next sections let us learn more about each of the features we saw in the Dialect app like the Smart Messages, Smart Notifications, and NFT chat stickers!
Dialect Smart messages
Smart Messages is an amazing user interface revolution being developed by the Dialect team. It can do literally any operation, that a user can perform in any dApp that is embraced the Dialect Messaging Standard (there are right now 50+ dApps that embedded the Dialect Messaging layer into their tech stack). With this users can perform operations like:
Minting NFTs directly from the wallet interface.
Placing a bid for an ongoing NFT auction directly from the wallet.
Polling user votes for decision-making on DAOs.
Trading on DEXs directly from the wallet.
All the above and more, are Platform-User interactions, but Dialect Messaging Standard is capable of much more than that!
As we can see from the above embedded video, Dialect turns a personal DM chat into an interactive payment portal so seamlessly….COOOL RIGHT!
Did you observe any difference between the first image of Gpay (web2 payment platform) and this Dialect interface??
YES, THIS WEB3 VERSION IS SO MUCH BETTER!
Because it has all the simplicity of a web2 application and its a crypto transaction! It need not go through centralized banking systems!
This shows the potential of web3 when combined with user-focused minimal interfaces, it goes miles ahead of its web2 alternatives!
Wait! There’s more to it! We discussed the subscription-based updates service earlier right? This can be done in chat! Just send the wallet address of the creator or the platform which can be followed directly from the chat, to enable updates on the wallet!
Everything looks so cool already, but do you miss the fun stickers you send your friends on web2 social media, wait for the Dialect version of it, it’s wild!
NFT Chat stickers
NFT chat stickers are a unique feature being offered by the Dialect Mobile Messaging application, where users can Mint, Share, and Trade stickers in the form of NFTs!
As you login into the application, you are gifted with a generous NFT pack of stickers called “GENESIS“, as you use the application, the more the number of friends you refer to use the application, the higher the chance of grabbing a rare set of NFT stickers.
Not only that, these stickers are NFTs made using two of the coolest technologies Solana and Metaplex, with their innovative compressing technology, the minting costs are reduced to a large extent, making it a cheap and easy way to express user thoughts and emotions in a fun and interactive way!
There is more to these NFTs, in the future Dialect wants to create a 1/1 line-up of digital artists to create a unique collection of special collectibles and NFTs. The current team of amazing sticker pack artists can be seen in the below image!
Dialect Smart Notifications
Dialect Smart Notification is another key solution to a problem called Web3 interconnectivity. As we discussed previously this enables dApps to send notifications and updates directly to the user’s wallet. This reduces the amount of noise and spam in the web2 channels like Discord or Slack. It also helps developers to create a Conditional Cross-dApp platform to trigger notifications when a certain event occurs.
Over 50+ integrations have been done with various dApps which embraced the Dialect messaging standard and embedded the subscribe option to enable their community to view updates directly in the Dialect Mobile App wallet.
Going multi-chain: Hola Aptos
Along with Interconnectivity, there is a need for interoperability, where users can perform transactions and view updates across a multi-chain ecosystem. And Dialect adheres to the same principle, and as a step towards the same, Dialect announced its support for the Aptos chain and its extended Ecosystem. And Dialect is in plans to extend its multi-chain capabilities by accepting more chains in the future.
Onboarding the Dialect App
Let’s get to the good part! Dialect already announced its live application launch on the IOS platform, so let us explore the onboarding experience on the applications!
Welcome page:
Username registration: The user registration is quite simple, the interface shows the wallet address on the screen once the user enters a unique username and proceeds to the next step.
Claiming the NFT sticker pack (peak hype!!!): Next the user would be asked to claim the default GENESIS NFT pack, this action can be completed in a single click, then this package would be added to the collection.
User chat with NFT (glimpse): As shown in the below glimpse this is the way users can communicate on the wallet itself, and can also share the NFT stickers in the collection.
Smart Messages (glimpse): As discussed above, a smart message can involve many things like NFT bidding, DAO voting, or a simple crypto transaction, in the below image we can see how users can transfer crypto directly from the chat, just by clicking on send and approve!
Referral Page: The referral page contains the current leaderboard with the most number of referrals, and the more referrals you get to the app, the rarer NFT sticker packs you get!
Untapped potential of Dialect
Dialect is still in the mid-stage of its development, but it has tremendous potential applications in the future, which can define the way web3 goes into the masses, some of the interesting applications would be:
Collaborating via wallet DMs: Every day there are hundreds of projects being shipped in the web3 ecosystem, there might be many factors pulling back developers from collaborating with bigger projects or creators, lack of social presence, coming from an underdeveloped nation, etc. But a pseudonymous wallet like Dialect can act as a barrier to avoid these factors affecting the growth of the ecosystem and developers, and creators can collaborate with each other, on Dialect with on-chain activity linked to their address as Proof-Of-Work!
Developers can build dApps linking specific events across the ecosystem: For suppose a developer can create an application that can monitor the trading price on a DEX, and ask for notification-based approval of selling when a price event is triggered, which is previously set by the user.
At the same time, this can also be used to create conditional dApps which will be of the format (if this, then that), which is a classic web2 API analogy, which can trigger multiple actions across dApps, with a single approval via notification.
Competitive Landscape and threats
As of now, there is a limited competition to Dialect, as most of the other implementations are still in a preview or in development modes like XMPT’s message transport protocol or WalletConnect’s Wallet-to-Wallet messaging preview. The closest competitor to Dialect would be Blockscan, which is being developed by the team behind Etherscan. Although Dialect holds a key advantage being a Mobile application that is accessible to a larger demography compared to Blockscan’s web version. But the next important step for Dialect would be to spread its presence across multiple chains, to spread services to key dApps across the web3 ecosystem, before other competitors arise on different chains.
My thoughts and Conclusion
I always wondered why I see a very less number of web3 applications on mainstream media or in mass adoption, and after researching the origins of the Dialect platform, I can confirm that a complex technical UX and lack of interconnectivity are the two main reasons why most the dApps fail to reach their target audience.
Really happy about Dialect for two things, one obviously for developing this application to help dApps reach their target audience and help users experience a clutter-free web3 ecosystem. But the second reason is the way Dialect is open-sourced as an SDK for any other dApp to integrate it into their product, kudos to the team for this decision!
Thank you for giving this long technical deep dive a read. Hope I made it a fun and interesting experience for you all, if you liked the article give a like, share it with your friends, and give your feedback as a comment below!
💌
Regards,
Rohit Kumar Varma
References:
Dialect website: https://www.dialect.to/
Dialect Developer Docs: https://docs.dialect.to/documentation/
Dialect Twitter: https://twitter.com/saydialect