This article comes fromThe Block, original author: Tom Matsuda

Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang

Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang

Sending Labs, a Web3 communications project, has completed a $12.5 million seed round of financing, co-led by Insignia Venture Partners, MindWorks Capital and Signum Capital, with an undisclosed valuation.

The deal was completed last month, and founders Mason Yang and Joe Yu began financing in August 2022, with participation from K 3 Ventures, LingFeng Innovation Fund, UpHonest Capital, and Aipollo Investment.

Mason Yang and Joe Yu founded MoboTap, the company behind Dolphin, the Internet browser, one of the first Android browsers, with more than 200 million users in 130 countries. When Google was preparing to launch its own browser, it pulled Dolphin from its app store, the two founders said, citing that the browser violated API access permissions.

"From our experience with Google ten years ago to Twitter's official ban on third-party clients recently, everything shows that as long as we maintain the existing infrastructure, innovation will always be limited by existing players," Yu said in a statement. stated in a written interview.

Later, after users complained about the removal of Dolphin, the app was reinstated — an important lesson for him, Yu says, in recognizing the power of community and influencing his beliefs about decentralization in Web3. Faith in long-term commitment.

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Web3 messaging

In addition to this funding round, the company has launched two beta versions of its flagship products. Among them, SendingMe is its encrypted chat platform, users can not only increase fans on the platform, but also monetize the projects they create through peer-to-peer exchange, market, airdrop and NFT auction. Sending Labs said the platform is powered by a decentralized protocol.

“Conversations are worthless, but our assets are not. If we want to upgrade the communication experience to include the ability to freely gift, redeem, and accept digital ownership, then all of our chat content, not just our DMs (private messages), but Community chat scenarios, all have to be secured,” he said, “At the same time, this is the first step in taking back ownership of our own data — starting to bring data back to user-owned edge devices instead of storing it on servers. "

Another product is SendingNetwork, a software development kit for crypto application developers to build social functionality aligned with the decentralized ethos of Web3. This includes in-app and cross-app chat, notifications, wallet or decentralized ID (DID) logins, NFTs, and token-based transactions.

Yu explained: “The easiest way to think of SendingNetwork is as a parallel protocol integrated into the L1 and L2 chains—a modified P2P architecture tailored for secure, high-performance message relay, capable of Execute smart contracts on different chains.” He noted that it currently supports integrations with Ethereum and Polygon.