# Drop Your Email

By [Graeme](https://paragraph.com/@graeme-2) · 2022-08-09

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Between 2010 and 2020, email addresses became the primary identity handle for the internet. Email address list-building became critical for creators and marketing departments as a way to stay engaged and sell to audiences. But it's now time to start building communities around the new identity primitive of the internet: the web3 wallet.

Emails are still useful for notifications today, but we no longer want to center online experiences around usernames, emails, or mobile numbers; we want to build the internet around the web3 wallet.

Usernames were mostly used before email addresses. People would pick a username to identify themselves and reuse it across forums – often using the same username/password combination for authentication. But email addresses proved to be a more powerful primitive than the username because they served two important functions:

1.  Websites could send alerts and announcements via email.
    
2.  Emails could be used as an account recovery mechanism; we rely on the email account's security as the basis for many other platform logins.
    

But web3 wallets offer even more power:

1.  Wallets can provide strong verification guarantees on authorship because users can digitally sign content with their private key.
    
2.  Wallets can encrypt information, enabling cross-platform end-to-end privacy.
    
3.  Wallets enable purchasing ability natively in the web experience without needing to connect a credit card or rely on a third-party payments service like Stripe or Amazon.
    
4.  Wallets can enable universal login without giving power to a specific company like Facebook, or to a nation-state.
    

Try out web3 wallet subscriptions using the link below:

subscribe://

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*Originally published on [Graeme](https://paragraph.com/@graeme-2/drop-your-email)*