Thank You, Mailchain Community
On 5th May 2026, we will permanently shut down the Mailchain protocol. All services, including app.mailchain.com, will be taken offline. If you have messages you would like to keep, please export them before that date.
Looking back
Mailchain started in 2018 as an exploration into something that felt obvious: if you have a blockchain address, you should be able to receive a message at it. The idea was straightforward, and the technology to make it work was genuinely interesting.
In 2019 we open-sourced the protocol and made a decision that shaped everything that followed. Contributors turned up, filed issues, wrote code, and told us what mattered to them. The early community was small but thoughtful, and their input made the protocol better in ways we could not have anticipated.
Over the years, Mailchain grew to support Ethereum and roughly 2,000 EVM-compatible chains, along with Solana, NEAR, and Tezos. We integrated with ENS, Lens Protocol, Unstoppable Domains, MetaMask, Brave, and WalletConnect. End-to-end encryption was non-negotiable from the start: your messages were yours, designed so that nobody, including us, could read them. The protocol offered a free public-good message quota because we believed access to private, on-chain communication should not carry a price tag.
There is so much work still to do in decentralised identity and communication. Humanity deserves better tools.
Why we are closing
Our commercial model and the market timing did not align. Despite this, we are proud of the technology, the community, and the work our team did to enable private web3 communication.
We explored options for the protocol to find a new home, and none materialised. Rather than let the service degrade quietly, we would rather close with enough warning to give active users time to act.
Exporting your messages
Systems will be running until 5th May 2026. You can export your messages using our open-source extraction tool:
Follow the instructions in the repository to download your message history.
All stored data is encrypted (only accessible using your Secret Recovery Phrase). We intend to delete all data when services are taken offline. User accounts will no longer function after the shutdown date.
If you need help, please contact us at support@mailchain.com. We will be monitoring that address until the shutdown date.
Thank you
To everyone who sent a message through Mailchain, contributed a pull request, filed a bug report, joined a hackathon, or simply believed that communication in web3 could be done better: thank you.
Building this alongside you was a privilege. The technology, the ideas, and the people all mattered, and the people mattered most of all.
With gratitude,
Tim Boeckmann & Rob De Feo
Co-founders, Mailchain
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