One of the most popular messaging/chat application today, KakaoTalk, is reported to be in deliberation for possible integration of a crypto wallet.
Kakaotalk is a very Korean phenomenon. I think they can do fiat payments over there using it, not sure. To me it looks bloated, very bloated. Of course Korea has the latest gen smartphones so they don't even notice, but try it with a bit older model and you immediately notice (if the app even installs in your older Android). I don't think there is a kakaotalk lite variant is there?
Japan has Line, China has Wechat (whatever happened to qq), Russia has Telegram (ironically hated by Putin's gov), America has Whatsapp (which sucks the most) and now FB, but thats pulling a group into IM which is redundant since Whatsapp, FB and Instagram are belong to Zuckerberg...
Signal is a "fixed" Whatsapp, but people ignore it. There are private oriented IM like Riot.im (which uses Matrix) and the clients using the tox protocol.
It seems that, as in the early days of IM, we are going to have to use several of them. It all started with Israel's ICQ (yes i know there was talk before), then came others such as AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, etc. An open protocol called XMPP (Jabber) came along and some people use it, most notably Google at first before dumping it for whatever hangouts is.
So how many IM people are supposed to install to communicate with friends? And now each and everyone wants their own coin/token... I'm not opposed to wallet integration into IM, but they should be separate. If Telegram wants an ico, make a separate wallet for it. If both are installed they could integrate, but let people decide if they want both or one. Perhaps they are trying to use their platform as a kind of "free" massive ICO advertising?
Discord was meant as a gamers IM platform, perhaps like the one bundled with Steam (Friends?). Hmm maybe there is MLP reference in there, probably just my imagination...
IRC is good enough. Now get off my lawn!
