Decentralized finance has revolutionized how we invest and trade — swapping, trading, lending, and borrowing across dApps. Without hesitation, I would say that one of the most revolutionary aspects of DeFi is how we will receive push notifications in the future.
It’s hard to believe that only 10 years ago the most popular forex trading software, MetaTrader, did not have a native push notification service. ETrade was a pioneer, introducing mobile push notifications in 2009. Yet all these notifications still go to different apps on a mobile device. If you’ve surpassed your investment portfolio risk limit, it could take a while to sort out all the alerts to find out.
It took me some time to realize that the early blockchain days were very similar to the early days of the internet. Blockchain, for all of its benefits and advancements, has the same early day problem; there is no automatic or push notification system. This is the problem Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) intends to solve. EPNS is mitigating these risks by aggregating push notifications in one place. Investors can quickly decide whether to close or increase a position, redirect assets to a higher earning staking pool, or take other actions.
The blockchain-based notification service is platform agnostic and incentivized. The service providers create channels to which the users can subscribe. All channels direct messages to the user's wallet. And all users are incentivized with $PUSH token rewards for using the service.
It’s a flashback to the days before mobile trading push notification alerts existed. Today, no one would sign up for that service. Similarly, one day soon, push notification service users will begin to expect all notifications across all financial services accounts in one place. Once they use EPNS, there will be no going back to the old days of siloed notification systems,
Usecase based on the latest event:
In May 2020, Uniswap launched V2 of its protocol. The launch required a significant communications and ecosystem management effort, as the successful launch of the V2 AMM required the migration of liquidity providers (LPs) from V1 to V2. The migration of LPs was successful due to Uniswap’s clear information and community visibility — but it still took months to happen.
Retrospectively, Uniswap’s V2 migration could have been aided by a notification service, which would have provided both Uniswap and LPs a single source for information and communication. Instead of relying on tweets, Telegram messages, and blog posts to get in front of LPs, Uniswap would be able to identify just the V1 LP wallets of the need to migrate to V2. At the time, there existed no native, on-chain way to inform specific eligible wallets.
With EPNS, Uniswap could have enabled notifications to be sent to eligible wallets to better ensure communication and engagement around the migration.
Who is backing up the project:
Founded in 2020, EPNS has raised $1.41 Million in seed funding. The proceeds will go to accelerate the development of the world’s first decentralized notification protocol, allowing services (dApps, platforms, services, smart contracts) to communicate with its users (wallet addresses) in a decentralized way. The Alpha version of EPNS is already live with a public launch of service expected by this year.
The proceeds were raised in two rounds. Back in December, EPNS raised $750K in seed investment from Web 3.0 leaders and crypto funds, including Balaji Srinivasan (former COINBASE CTO, a16z General Partner, and Co-founder of Earn), Kenneth Ng (Ethereum Foundation), Mariano Conti (former MakerDAO Head of Smart Contracts), and more.
In the March round, EPNS raised $660K with participation from several VC investors, including BINANCE Labs, True Ventures, “Mysterio”, IOSG, Bixin, Bitscale, LD Capital, and BR Capital along with prominent industry leaders Sandeep Nailwal (Co-founder, Polygon), Ajit Tripathi (Head of Institutional Business, Aave), Pareen (AVP-Marketing, WazirX) and more.
Who is partnering with EPNS?
EPNS is actively signing up for collaboration agreements and pilot programs with prominent projects to make decentralized push notifications more powerful, efficient, and fun. Recent collaborations signed-off include:
- Unstoppable Domains
- Uniswap
- Mask Network
- PoolTogether
- Superfluid
- Alpha Finance and more.
Recently EPNS partnered with Polygon (previously Matic) to scale EPNS towards a scalable, multi-chain environment. Polygon plays a critical role for the entire ecosystem, as it provides a platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development that will greatly increase the capabilities of the entire Ethereum network.
The partnership with Polygon will consist of:
- Implementation of Polygon’s infrastructure in the EPNS protocol to deliver scalable, low-cost notifications.
- Creating a channel for Polygon and delivering notifications important for their network.
- Co-development of notification infrastructure to support Polygon’s vision of the “Internet of Blockchains.”
- Development of notifications for the MATIC community and Polygon project. Co-development of push notifications for the Ethereum ecosystem.
