I ran across XMTP a few times while I was poking around with other services. But I had pushed it off till later. It wasn’t core to what I was looking at. But then while I was playing around with Paragraph I saw somewhere XMTP delivery was an option for people to subscribe to your content. That was a pretty interesting use case, so I picked it up and tried to experiment with what I could. Keep in mind that my use case is a bit tilted toward that notification channel idea.
One of the best places I found to get an overview is the Messari research report. As of right now (Nov 2025) that report has started to get a bit stale, but it was a great way to understand what some of the high level ideas where. There’s a bunch of pretty marketing heavy copy on the main XMTP site. The use cases and tools described on the project pages didn’t really match up to what I was seeing in the repos and code. And I never was able to figure out how to get Paragraph to send anything via XMTP.
I think this stuff is just the result of the project cycling at a pretty high frequency and working on new things. That did make it necessary to separate hype and froth from actual service though. When I saw the mini apps example showing Base and Farcaster on top of the Paragraph stuff I had run across initially I thought the project was up and running in full. I thought maybe I could get involved in some way, even though I might be late to the party. I’m not sure that’s the case though. I’m pretty sure everything is running on the testnet currently. If there is a mainnet up and going now I think it might just be getting used for some of the demo use cases. There is a mainnet ops epic on the project board, but I didn’t see any info about it in the docs. I figured maybe the mainnet stuff was tucked away behind actually funding an account, but my attempt to check out the funding portal all ran into errors or permission requests. So I assume that’s all very early stage. Which is all fine, it’s an early project.
Like when I had poked around with the Basic Attention Token initially, I just wanted to know if this was something I could just pick up and build with. I don’t think it would be for most of the uses I have in mind currently. Though I could certainly build something with it. I put the agents together to demo a simple notification setup, and it works. In order to be useful as a notification system there has to be a critical mass of people who drive their actions out of the inbox you’re delivering to. I’m not seeing that be the case. That’s mostly because of the target audience and not the technology. I’m currently thinking about some crypto tools for online content creators. Generally content creators want to lean on things that are already mass behaviors, not drive new adoption. I could be wrong there however. I could certainly see delivering a message about new content into the same wallet you use to pay for that content yielding better conversion rates for the content creator. But I assume if that was always the case the XMTP options in Paragraph would be more prominent.
I do love the idea of the project. I like the idea of interoperability by keeping the identity and inbox distinct. And messaging of some sort is a core service, even if we might have to figure out the higher value versions if there is postage in the system. I’ll likely keep poking around. Hopefully I can find a small area where I can contribute a bit while keeping an eye on how it evolves.