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Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi worked in the blockchain, fintech, and SaaS space, and in companies like Deloitte and Wipro for over a decade, before trying to start. The husband and wife duo wanted to do something in the blockchain space and create the next web.
They understood one thing: blockchain in 2019 behaved the same way as in 2003. Most services expect users to keep coming back to them and blockchain simply has no notifications. It led them to launch Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) in January 2020 in Mumbai.
Notifications in general do not exist on the blockchain, which is hard to imagine coming from traditional web services, where people are notified of their next meeting, email, payment or social invitation. EPNS has decided to solve this problem.
What does EPNS do?
The platform allows services to send notifications to wallets. But in addition to just notifications, users also earn from receiving notifications. Since the encrypted data of these notifications is stored on the blockchain (directly or indirectly), it not only allows the team to send push notifications to mobile devices or tablets, but essentially any centralized or decentralized operator.
Notifications can be sent platform-independent to mobile phones, tablets, web browsers and even web3’s favorite wallets (Metamask, Trust, etc.).
“Despite this growth and the expanding use of blockchain technology, services (dApps, services, smart contracts) still lack a true means of communication with their users, sometimes filled with alternative means of communication such as Twitter, telegram or e-mail. Notifications are seven times more powerful than these means of delivering information, ”explains Harsh.
The company has a global team of nine members who have known each other for many years. The team includes Jafett Sandi, Product and Development Lead and Andrew Redden, who is the Protocol and Research Lead.
“The remaining team brings varied experience and expertise across all domains and helped shape the project with a single goal of creating a unique product that did not previously exist,” adds Harsh.
Difference from normal notifications
Although the duo have experience in creating notifications and blockchains, most push notifications are centralized and require association of device IDs to usernames (for example: Facebook knows you are logged in because it has a server that monitors).
When custom notifications are sent to devices, they are complex as two services generally work on different principles and one is usually serverless and the other requires a server – it is difficult to establish a connection between them.
“EPNS intelligently solves this problem by abstracting the on-chain data layer and creating access that doesn’t even send private credentials or centralized registration to users,” says Harsh.
The team connects decentralized platforms to a centralized one by dissociating data storage / configuration and intended recipients on the chain, which can then be collected by the infrastructure using the solutions (or other third party infrastructure if they want to build our protocol) and they can be forwarded to centralized services (mobile, tablet, web, etc.). They can also be detected by decentralized services and shown as a Twitter feed (for example: Alpha dApp).
How does it work
“We see notifications as a means of communicating different types of information, carrying different utilities, and performing different tasks based on use cases. To do this, we assign each notification payload a payload type that defines certain characteristics of both data and they carry both of the storage medium, ”explains Harsh.
These in turn are stored and processed as files JSON payload, which is transformed according to the rules of the different vectors when the notification reaches them. The JSON payload can differ based on payload types, which ensures flexibility of storage content, data, interpretation and delivery. This helps to create different rules and interpretations of the notification content (for example: transport of images, call to action, live video, etc.).
The protocol allows users to have direct control over the services from which they receive notifications, imposes rules on services including spam protection for users, limiting their ability to add wallets as subscribers, etc. The protocol also incentivizes users who receive notifications.
This on-chain data abstraction allows for delivery to centralized and decentralized couriers, and notifications are treated more like a social feed (e.g. Twitter) than ephemeral information (although there are also means of doing so). It also allows you to retrieve rules, incentives, settings and configuration from a single source of truth and is not dependent on a single point of failure.
“Storing the JSON payload on decentralized storage and just its pointer / hash on the on-chain logs allows for cost optimization. Although the protocol also allows for the entire on-chain payload to be stored for services that intend to do so. The abstraction of the data layer on the chain (directly or indirectly) ensures that notifications are platform independent and also available on decentralized media (e.g. dApps, wallets that may not want to trust a central point of truth), “explains Harsh .
The blockchain space
Blockchain as an industry is still in its nascent stage in India. However, startups like Binance, Unocoin, WazirX and others focus on Blockchain and the crypto space and use cases are slowly expanding. Tech30 startup, Senderment, uses blockchain technology to make it easy for global companies to collect data from individuals, with their explicit consent.
The EPNS team had brought the idea to the Ethereum Foundation, when they were guided to ETHGlobal’s HackMoney, a 30-day virtual hackathon. EPNS was selected and led by global design firm IDEO on their product validation day (PVD) and then selected for Gitcoin Kernel accelerator / incubator.
EPNS charges service staking fees to activate notifications. This goes through staking – lending – part of the interest to generate revenue, which is then given to users who choose to receive notifications from these services.
“The main revenue comes from charging micro fees to the service when they send notifications. This micro fee is set up in a decentralized way and the governance part of the protocol manages it,” explains Harsh.
He adds that the team is exploring InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to form a decentralized communication system between users. Harsh explains: “IPNS is a static file over IPFS that points to your website hosted on IPFS. We are looking for ways we can use it to potentially form different communication points that are enabled between user and user. This can lead to exciting possibilities. for example, having a chat thread on IPFS that carries the previous hash (cid) with it and IPNS keeps updating the last hash as a pointer to that chat. This can also be explored to make room for the possible decentralized video messaging and other exciting discoveries “.
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