Wallet native messaging: your wallet is the account
Wallet native messaging means the wallet is the account and the address book. How the signature login works, what it does not promise, and Cherry's take.
Wallet native messaging is chat in which a crypto wallet is both the account and the address book: you prove an address is yours by signing a message with it, and you reach other people at their address or at a name that resolves to one. Cherry (cherry.fun) is a wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app for crypto built that way, with no phone number, no email and no KYC. The term describes where identity comes from. It says nothing about where the messages are kept, which is the part most descriptions get wrong.
How wallet native messaging works
Three things change once the wallet is the login.
Sign-in becomes a signature. The app shows a short text message, the wallet signs it, and the signature proves the address belongs to whoever holds the keys. Nothing is written to the chain and no gas is spent. ERC-4361, the Sign-In with Ethereum standard, sets that message format for Ethereum accounts, which it describes as accounts that “authenticate with off-chain services by signing a standard message format”. Sign In With Solana, the specification Phantom maintains, is modelled on it and does the same job for Solana wallets.
Addressing becomes public. Every account already has a public identifier, so a stranger can open a conversation with someone who has never installed the app: no username to look up, no invite to hand out. Names make it readable: a .sol or .sns name, a .skr name on Solana Seeker, or another AllDomains name resolves to the address and becomes the display name.
Access becomes a balance check. Because the account is an address, an app can read what that address holds and use the answer as the entry rule for a room. That is what token gated chat and NFT gated chat are built on.
What wallet native messaging does not promise
Wallet native is a claim about the account. Storage is a separate question. On Cherry, messages are stored off-chain on Cherry’s servers and none of a conversation is written to a blockchain; the chain is read for gating and for payments, never used to carry a message. Direct messages are end-to-end encrypted with keys derived from your wallet signature, so Cherry cannot read them. Group chats are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderation and bots can work. Worth knowing before you move a community.
Custody is separate too. Signing in costs nothing, the private key never leaves the wallet, and Cherry never holds your funds.
Example on Cherry
Cherry’s sign-in is Sign In With Solana, and 77,420 wallets had signed in as of 10 September 2026. Your display name is the name you own and your avatar comes from that name’s record, so the person reading your message can check the profile against the chain first.
After that, the address is all anyone needs. You can DM any wallet address, or alice.sol, or alice.skr, and the recipient does not need a Cherry account yet; the conversation waits for them. A first message from a stranger arrives in the recipient’s requests folder with no push notification, and declining it is silent. A sender who wants a cold DM to notify pays a flat fee, 0.01 SOL as of 10 September 2026, and the message goes out only after that payment confirms.
The same identity opens rooms. SNS Club admits wallets that hold a .sol name and had 1,455 members on 10 September 2026; nobody in it filled in a form or clicked a verify link to get there.
Related terms
- Wallet-to-wallet messenger : the same idea named after the conversation instead of the login.
- Wallet identity : names, avatars, badges and multi-wallet profiles on Cherry.
- DM a wallet address : what happens when you message an address that has never opened the app.
- Encrypted DMs with no phone and no KYC : how the keys are derived and what they cover.
- .skr domain : the Seeker name that doubles as a gate.
FAQ
Is a wallet native messenger the same as a wallet-to-wallet messenger?
They describe the same app from two angles. Wallet native says the wallet is the login and the profile; wallet-to-wallet says the conversation runs between two addresses, with no username or phone number in between.
Are messages in a wallet native messenger stored on-chain?
On Cherry they are not. Messages are stored off-chain on Cherry’s servers, direct messages as ciphertext that only the two wallets can open, and the chain is read for gating and payments rather than used to carry a conversation.
Sources
Try Cherry
Sign in with a wallet, DM any address, and join token-gated and paid communities. No phone number, email, or KYC.