LedgerMail aims to tackle everything wrong with traditional email, but will inevitably fall short.
It has become an established joke that blockchain is a technology in search of a problem to solve. Although this quip is deliberately provocative, designed to needle a thin-skinned community of enthusiasts, there is a measure of truth to it too. Since the emergence of cryptocurrency, the first blockchain use case, entrepreneurs have come up with tens of alternative applications for the technology, which can be thought of as a time-stamped database of transactions distributed among the members of a network. With varying degrees of success, blockchain has been applied to fields ranging from supply chain management and enterprise data protection to identity verification and more. The emergence of ( DeFi), meanwhile, has seen blockchain used to facilitate peer-to-peer lending, borrowing and the like. Now, a company called Pingala Software believes it has come up with the latest killer use case. Earlier this year, the firm launched LedgerMail, a product billed as “the world’s first decentralized email solution”. The service promises to liberate users from invasions of privacy, insecure message transfer protocols, and abuses of centralized power. However, LedgerMail also relieves users of a number of aspects of traditional email they might rather like to keep. In fact, so fundamental are the differences, it might be considered misleading to characterize LedgerMail as an email service at all. Speaking to TechRadar Pro over Zoom, Suraj Malla, VP Marketing and Sales at Pingala, methodically set out the case in favor of blockchain-based email. To understand the benefits, though, it’s first important to understand the attributes that define a public blockchain network: According to Malla, this combination of qualities means blockchain is uniquely equipped to neutralize one-by-one the significant problems with the traditional email systems we rely on today. For example, the harvesting of email data en masse by the likes of Google and Microsoft is made possible by the centralization of power and control. “But with LedgerMail, there is no centralized authority managing and controlling your data,” Malla explained. “And this also means there is no central point of failure.” Likewise, a large proportion of email-based cyberattacks are made possible by the continued use of archaic transfer protocols (like IMAP and SMTP). But LedgerMail replaces email transfer protocols with blockchain, which Malla described as “one of the most secure technologies in the modern world”.
