1.3. Why wallets, not accounts

Most messengers grew up around the idea of an account: you give them a phone number or email, they turn that into your identity, and every conversation is linked back to those details. This is convenient, but it comes with side effects. Phone numbers can be attacked or stolen. Email databases can leak. Account recovery flows can be abused. Your chat identity ends up tightly coupled to your real life identity whether you want that or not.

Obscura starts from a different place. A wallet already proves that you control a key. That is enough to authenticate you and give you a stable identity in the system. There is no need to add a second layer of phone or email on top just to map it back to who you are in the real world.

Using wallets instead of accounts means a few things in practice:

1. You can stay pseudonymous if you want. A wallet can be just an address with no name attached.

2. You do not have to repeat the same registration process for yet another product. The wallet you already use on Solana is the same one you use to chat.

3. There is less sensitive personal data for the service to store. If no phone numbers are collected, there are no phone numbers to leak.

It also lines up better with how crypto native users already think. On Solana you send tokens to a wallet, interact with contracts as a wallet, and join communities as a wallet. Obscura extends that model to communication, so you can also talk as that wallet, and talk directly to other wallets, without creating a separate messaging identity for every new context.