I’ve noticed that most Polkadot and DeFi projects today handle customer support through Discord, Telegram, or Twitter. While these platforms are useful for community chat, they create some serious problems when it comes to support:
For users:
It’s hard to know which accounts or messages are real and which are scams. Fake support DMs are a huge risk.
Users often have to give up personal details (like name or email) just to get help, even though they might only want to fix a transaction issue.
When issues aren’t handled quickly, users lose trust in the project.
For projects/teams:
Support requests get lost in thousands of chat messages. There’s no proper way to track issues over time.
Scaling support is difficult. As projects grow, the burden on community managers gets heavier.
Teams lack data or analytics about what problems users face most often.
This makes me wonder: would a dedicated, Web3-native customer support platform solve these problems?
The idea in short:
A system like “Zendesk for Web3.”
Users log in with their wallet and create a support ticket without sharing personal details.
Tickets are private and could be protected with cryptography or zero-knowledge proofs to maintain user privacy.
Teams get a proper dashboard to manage and resolve tickets, instead of relying on scattered Discord threads.
I’m curious to see how the Polkadot community views this.
Do you think customer support is a serious gap in Web3 today, especially for Polkadot projects?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and see how the community views this challenge.
I think it is just spinning another platform that is alien for everybody, that needs to be developed from scratch, when we have incredible challenges pointing users to one place; having another platform is, at this point of the movie, not the right strategy.
Discord ( US company, with draconian privacy terms), TG( using non-encrypted comms by default, and backdoored both by western and eastern governments - maybe, who knows?) and Matrix ( still a temperamental animal, but open source) are not the best - buy maybe building a bot for the ticketing can help - and it is quicker, cheaper and probably as effective as your solution.
Maybe, when other pressing topics are resolved, this could be a good example of “eating our own food” - build a nice dApp using our technology.
I agree that a bot can solve a lot of problems, especially around organizing tickets and reducing noise in Discord/Telegram. But in most cases, users eventually want to talk to a human, not just a bot, especially when dealing with sensitive issues like transactions or wallets. Having a proper platform makes it easier for teams to assign, track, and resolve those cases without things slipping through the cracks.
If we can build the platform to be super easy and frictionless (login with wallet, no extra sign-ups, clean interface), I think both users and projects would be happy to adopt it because the value they get in return (security, privacy, proper support experience) would be much bigger than the friction of trying something new.
Bots might be a great first step, but a dedicated platform could take support to the next level.
Do you think projects would consider moving if the user experience were as easy as Discord but far safer?
That means projects have to manage the signing with wallets to store the messages and sessions. Because some queries required human intervention, or big whales might prefer assistance for their big volumes.
Most fundamentally we need an on-chain messaging system that allows one to one and one to many configurations. I used to look at on-chain messaging as get paid to be spammed. But my thoughts have changed due to reliance on twitter and other mechanisms to broadcast messages and those messages only being received by the fraction of users that happen to have a twitter and be following that project.
For any web2 business, being unable to send a message to your users / customers would be a non-starter. Can you imagine web2 without email? Having to send passwords or verification via snail mail (which was done for quite awhile by entities like paypal in the early days).
For example, Hydration should be able to send out a message on-chain to every one of their users and for wallets to have integrated this and have an in-wallet communications feature. Initially I can see it being used to broadcast changes, updates, etc from governance to users. Stretch goals, I could see using the same storage layers to roll a discord or similar.
There are a number of key exchange and encryption mechanisms that could be used for this along with native storage to store the messages and for users to see the messages. Further, requiring sender deposits and allowing receivers to reap the deposits would incentivize users to check and read messages.
For me, it was a mistake forcing every SaaS app to handle authentication and authorization at the application layer in an ad-hoc manner.
I would like to see a more universal identity solution used instead of continuing the anti-pattern of ad-hoc, application-specific identity.
That being said, fake, scammy customer support agents are a HUGE attack vector and this idea definitely has value. Verified customer support agent identity is super valuable for community security.
However, I’d like to see a solution that allows customer support agents to have a holistic, verified identity that’s universal across platforms.
I used to feel the same way but then I looked at the economics of spam and these dudes are literally sending billions of messages for a single hit in many cases.
Even a small amount of friction could potentially blow them out of the water!