NftyChat is a web3 chat app. Their main features include direct messaging, community creation, and community discovery. You can chat with frens directly or make your own private/token gated community. It is completely free to use and requires no username or password. In nftychat, your wallet is your identity.

Alex Slobodnik is the co-founder of NftyChat.xyz. We are honored to have completed an exclusive interview with Slobo.

The highlights are below:

Slobo：My name is Slobo. I am the co-founder of NftyChat.xyz. My background is in fintech and I came into the web3 space a couple of years ago.

1.What do you think about the positioning of NftyChat and what are the advantageous features of NftyChat？

Slobo：I'd liked to take this opportunity to say the words we use to describe NftyChat. It's not servers and channels, it’s communities and rooms. I think it's really important that we build community, so we have the right words for that. Therefore, we see community members as users of our platform. We noticed that almost every single community on Discord and in Twitter had an announcement channel, but in NftyChat you don't have to look for the announcement channel because we integrate it directly into the UI, and it's always in the same place in every single community. When you log into NftyChat, everybody gets an automatically generated profile that lets you see everyone's NFTs and their contact links. Seeing the context of how one interacts with others and can see what they're actually doing on the blockchain helps form connections. It is my favorite feature and one of the first features we created because ultimately, what you do on the blockchain is who you are and it's a great way to start a conversation.

2. What are the features and functions that NftyChat can accomplish as a web3 social platform？

Slobo：Our goal is to integrate the best of web3. I want to bundle all the greatest protocols together. For example, music is a great way for people to bond, you might be working on something and you want to listen to music and at the same time you want to chat. Or there might be co-listening podcasts where you can listen to the same podcast and make comments and ask questions as it goes on. Or it could even be some sort of educational seminar that happens in a text-based format. There is so much room for innovation to incorporate all these different features. NftyChat, as a web3 chat app, can help you achieve all of these features.

3. How NftyChat solves the problems of traditional web2 platforms, such as email spam？

Slobo：Now, the conundrum is you can't charge people to send messages because it goes against what people expect. The way we've set it up is that we can set restrictions so that unless you do something on the chain, you won't be allowed to communicate with other people. The question I always ask is, how much email spam do you receive? If the cost of sending the email is a penny, then the answer is dramatically less. So structuring our platform through the wallet and allowing restrictions based on what you're already doing is really an ideal solution.

4. How do you think about incorporating AI technology in NftyChat？

Slobo：AI is incredible right now, and I personally use chatGPT to write code or to help me with email or do other basic tasks. But my perspective on embedding AI in NftyChat is that I will wait and see what works and what makes sense through people's feedback. We're primarily a community-based platform, and AI can enhance that, but I think it's very early in the process, diving in and devoting a lot of resources into making it work seems a little distracted from a business strategy perspective.

5. How do you feel about rewards to make users want to communicate through the platform?

Slobo：We will also have some similar functions. I have no principal objection to rewarding our users for activity. In fact, we recently airdropped NFTs for the top 100 most active users in one of our communities. But I think you have to be very careful not to create incentives that allow people to just game them, because ultimately, what you want is the real connections between people. From my observations, while you can use some incentives to bootstrap those connections, a lot of interactions driven by simplistic incentive structures tend to be of no value to the world.

6. In what ways does NftyChat now support community building?

Slobo：We're currently work with Polygon, so you can create your own community with your Polygon NFT. And you can use any sub-domain and it will come through. Furthermore, if you own something like a .com, you can import it into ENS and then you'll be able to use your traditional domain name. Our plan is to work with all the current layer tools. Because NftyChat is to bundle all the greatest protocols together, its features keep increasing as those protocols’ features increase, which means a better experience for users.

7. Is it now possible to trade directly on NftyChat and what are your plans for this feature？

Slobo：Today NftyChat allows you to set up your primary investments on it. We want people to be able to trade directly on our website in the future, which we have not implemented yet, but it's definitely on our roadmap. What we want to do is to remove the necessity of going off our platform, which makes commerce frictionless. More importantly, you'll see more information about (  ) sometime next week or the week after.

8. Please tell us about the cooperation with PDX.

Slobo：We are very excited and fortunate that PDX choose NftyChat as their community platform because PDX has a lot of traditional web2 developers on who don't have a lot of experience with web3 technology, many of them are just creating wallets for the very first time to use the techapp. So, we realized that for those who came from web2, we wanted to reward and support educating and get them to join web3. We designed 100 unique avatars provided to the most active users chosen by the leader of PDX. 30% of those who received an avatar used this as their avatar. So even if you've never had  a reason to create your own wallet, NftyChat is a good way to try because it’s literally free and anyone can log in and experience a large portion of its features. And we will always keep doing whatever makes sense for the community.

9. Can users build the features they need in NftyChat? How do you build communication with your users to better build NftyChat？

Slobo：We actually have an API that people can interface with and we're will to make it simpler. That automation you see is one of the accounts that I personally control, it sends a welcome message and if you respond, I respond to you. We've had over 11,000 messages sent to us and I respond to every single one that comes in, and I hope to continue to do that. This approach has helped us build the features that our users are really requesting, and I think the main request right now is an Android App. It’s basically the next biggest thing that we really want to deliver to our community members.

10. Please tell us about NftyChat's development status and future plans.

Slobo：We launched about a year ago, and we’ve had 10,000 connecting wallets this year, which is really exciting. Secondly, last month we had 1,500 people connecting wallets and got a community of over 1,000 people to join. For me, it’s very excited to see new communities, large and small, joining together. We probably have people creating a community almost every day. The biggest thing on the roadmap is better speed plus platform support.

Slobo：I would like to add that everyone please let others know about NftyChat and share with your friends. Give it a try, it is a really powerful tool. There is an iOS Testflight App only today, and we do plan to have an Android App sometime this year. But you can access nftychat.xyz on desktop browser, which currently provides the most optimized user experience.It is very privacy preserving. If you have any questions, my DMS is open. Thank you.