Harsh Rajat on notifications and messaging for Web3 networks

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have harsh regiat ceo and founder of epns the ethereum push network service um or name service sorry um it's a bit of a mouthful there but i'm excited to dive into this with you harsh because you know the cryptocurrency and blockchain uh industry is just so

0:25fast moving and it's hard to keep up with the news and i'm sure that uh epns it helps with that because they say if you're not struggling to keep up in cryptocurrency then you're not looking hard enough um so let's let's dive right into it thank you so much for joining uh today on the show thanks for having me ashton and uh yeah uh just just a little change all we

0:50are actually push notification service uh but yeah leaving services works just as well uh i think you nailed the description uh exactly bang on uh but just to uh make sure it comes from me as well so uh in essence what epn is uh is building is the communication layer for the entire battery in that way yeah ethereum is a misnomer uh why do we need it well

1:19because if we just think about it the first thing that we do in our day-to-day virtual interaction or in our world is essentially interact through everyone through notifications like we get up in the morning and we look at our phone and we see notifications from everything and everyone whether it's important emails whether it's for new people payments whether it's bank uh

1:46whether it's uh any social media things that we are doing whether it's gaming everything comes to us in notification even something as personal as chatting to friends we're not as much as chatting to friends as much as we are chatting through notifications in essence vector that who has figured out that you you on the two uh uh are a user name and uh they have

2:14services have figured out that he if something was uh of importance has occurred for you uh they will figure a way out to reach out to you and make sure that you know it works out just as well uh but that's just crap too right when you came to web3 this communication was essentially missing uh and more so the basic primitive notifications were feeling

2:38really absent when we started uh back around 2020 um via global and uh what did that what it did was it created a huge ux barrier uh and it created a terrible ux experience actually uh for example my loans they were liquidated but there was no way for uh the protocol to communicate to wallet addresses that was that three usernames uh and this this

3:07thing just got bigger and bigger like governance proposals they come and go and we were not able to talk to uh wallet addresses and tell them that you know this governance proposal is up for uh their votes to be casted on uh enos no means they they got expired and people then get to know that the ems domain has expired and you know even something as simple as

3:32when you were sending crypto payments uh to your uh decentralized wallets uh you had no way of knowing that you got your payment or you know you send your payment out so in essence uh all of these happen because there was a lack of communication uh uh primitives on web3 as a whole and that is what uh epns uh fulfilled uh we are essentially a decentralized communication protocol

4:01using with any app any smart contract any protocol and you can send notifications and by large all form of communication that are tied directly to our user wallet address and uh this is done in a secure encrypted open network uh which essentially means like just like how any crypto wallet can uh look at accounts ethereum blockchain data

4:28in similar way any crypto wallet can just tap into this network of us and can show all the communications out and when we did that it basically solved the problem of communication for battery and uh yeah i mean we started uh we went uh on ethereum minute around 16 january and we are imposing communications for a lot of cool protocols including you

4:56know pyda xre mega tau aracon bitcoin polygon pamper and so on so yeah that's the tlbro for ethereum push notification services amazing thank you for that intro harsh and and for the correction and you're right about notifications i feel like in in web 2 and and they sort of can run your life um you know if you don't take control of what notifications

5:22you have first thing you wake up in the morning is check the notifications and whether all of those are valuable or not sort of managing what information you want to take in and what information you don't by silencing notifications is very important to sort of managing the important tasks of the day but i feel like in web 3 that that system just doesn't exist

5:46without epns and for all those different functionalities you mentioned whether it's just checking the price of bitcoin going up above you know the price that you wanted to buy it at or making sure that the transaction that you sent confirmed not having to manually refresh or manually refresh your wallet waiting for some your payment to come in for for

6:06your work um and or just checking the the crypto news i feel like all of these uh could benefit from notification service never mind a decentralized notification service i feel like that makes it even harder you know not just taking notifications from different platforms and networks and trying to conglomerate them but doing it in a decentralized way that works

6:28through secure protocol i can imagine that makes it even harder to make this proper and to sort of filter out the noise so how have you and your team managed to sort of make the the protocol you know efficient and ensuring that people get the notifications that they want and not the ones that they don't want got it i mean that's an excellent question

6:50and uh uh the way we did it like uh the way we handle the uh spam or for notification is by making this protocol a user of them so in essence notifications can only be sent out by a protocol to a wallet address only if the wallet address has gone ahead and opted in for notification on the uh on our protocol

7:17and uh this is done in a gasless way just to make sure that the user experience remains paramount um you're right like everything needs notification like without notification even the zoom meeting would not have been possible because google calendar sent me a notification and most probably most likely that was the same case with you and that is very important like uh in that

7:43three it's extremely crucial like i talked about d5 uh i talked about governance like both of the cases notifications can really make a big big impact but if you talk about the things that are coming in battery like social networks lens uh without notifications like you will not know that someone followed you on twitter or if someone is dming you or

8:10you know you have a tweet out from a follower or someone you follow you will not know that uh and the social media gets so noisy that without notifications is specific to you uh you will not be able to you know venture out on those things and you know it gets bigger from there like uh look at metals uh how will we communicate with metals uh we need to have a way by

8:37which we can communicate to wallet and this is essentially like when you start thinking about all of those things and how to solve then epns becomes the solution uh of course like one thing i wanted to highlight like our goal is to be the webtree communication staff so it's not just about notifications but yeah everything starts with a notification and that's why we have to

9:04start with the notification but yeah in essence whatever communication stack needs are there for country uh epns is probably the best solution or the only solution in some cases so yeah and yeah when i think of notifications i really think of the user experience of you know having your phone and just swiping down and boom there's all of the important things that you've set right

9:32there and you know the notifications are sort of built into each one of those applications communicating with the phone to make it easy i feel like it's way harder on on web3 how do you replicate and improve upon the user experience of notifications in web3 to you know make sure that you're conveniently getting the notifications and then when you click on

9:57those they go to the corresponding platform to you know do whatever you're going to do with that notification it's awesome again amazing question uh the way we solved it like uh see web 2 and battery are very different in this case like web 2 apps have different user usernames and therefore our notification flows from our app to their username

10:24in web3 that's not the case in web3 and that's why we had to create a decentralized factory version uh for the notification and communication so but yeah in webkey your username is your wallet address right and that is shared which means that you use that username on munistrap you use it on our way you use it on lens you use it on any dap that you are interacting

10:50with and you also use it to send and receive payments or buy nfp so your wallet address is a shared username for that the best way for shared user name to operate in web3 is making sure that you know the shared username data is open but still secured like exactly how blockchain data is like ethereum i can access my ethereum account from metamask or from truss or any other

11:19wallet and what they are doing is they are interacting with the ethereum network and they are getting all the information about my account and displaying it and then if you know i have imported my private key in that crypto wallet i can essentially sign transactions and send those transactions out uh that's the same way like uh notifications uh on web3 uh wherein this

11:45open network can be adopted by any crypto wallet in crypto dab and crypto content uh because shared username so it needs to have shared info for communication uh so users can basically see their notifications or communications from any front end and if the notifications are encrypted or if any form of communications are encrypted then essentially the front end

12:15if the content has their private key then they will be able to dictate those notifications out and show it to the users otherwise no one will be able to see it so this is how like the architecture of f3 is vastly different from the architecture of them that's good to know and as more millions of new crypto users come into the industry start using different exchanges different wallets

12:42do you at epns have to manually make a partnership with that wallet to you know get people to start using epns or can people sort of use integrations without your team having to go and make all of these partnerships yeah so it's an open uh permissionless protocol so any crypto wallet can uh integrate with us any protocol can also

13:11integrate with us when it comes to sending notifications out uh currently i think uh in terms of integrations on the receiving notification site the users can go to our.tpms.io and they can see the notifications over there or can install our extension or can install our mobile app and they will see the same notifications and the wallet integration is of course coming

13:38uh but it's coming in q4 but as i said uh i think we have a lot of dabs already now that have integrated notifications so it has already started uh and yeah anyone can basically just go ahead and integrate the protocol out and that's about it i mean the beauty of f3 is it needs to be permissionless right definitely yeah and speaking of making a permission list and

14:06sort of making it easy for people to get notifications across the board uh you know having the the e and epns sort of tied onto the ethereum network how do you see the future of you know what they call multi-chain operation sort of ethereum and the ethereum virtual machine working with other blockchains or working with centralized solutions so that when people start using other

14:31blockchains that epns will work with everything else yeah so the idea of the vision when we started was always to be the de facto communication uh protocol for battery or basically enable all the communication stacks of f3 uh our vision is essentially that a user of any other blockchain even solana can send a notification or any form of

15:02communications out uh to a user of ethereum and vice versa uh similarly for the service or the protocol of ethereum they can notify even a solana user and that something uh of importance might have occurred for them so the way we see that he uses is like i can be a user of ethereum and polygon and any other blockchain right so there's an identity that should be

15:30tied to it and that identity should basically have these notifications or communications so i don't even have to come on ethereum and then come on adapt to realize that something i have interacted with requires my attention it will just go very smoothly um through all the how we webs it right from the very start so the only reason like uh uh

16:00we are on ethereum and uh haven't gone like the entire multi-same journey yet uh the only reason is that we wanted to make sure that you know we invented perfect notifications first on one blockchain make sure that it's working really really well which i think we did because we have sent over 15 million notifications for the apps or protocols that i just told

16:26you about and we have now 60 000 uh our users who have opted in uh to receive these notifications and it's essentially free for the users and for the services also to send notifications so it works really really well it just improves the ux alert uh but yeah now that we have done that uh that was just the start of the grand plan that we had so without giving anything away uh i

16:55would want to say like these three months are going to be really really exciting for us and it's going to be really really exciting for the battery users as a whole when it comes to anything communication very cool harsh i'm looking forward to to those updates when they come out and i saw speaking of you know sort of future plans and what's coming next for

17:19epns i saw that next week you're going to one of the biggest conferences of the year the missouri mainnet conference to speak alongside ave some d5 platforms and some other blue chip uh blockchain projects what um you know what are you sort of looking at as the main trends and what you're going to be speaking to these big projects about um with epns sort of moving

17:42forward in the industry got it uh yeah so i think uh i i'm speaking along with sunny and uh as you said a lot of other cool founders about social network economics by their broken and how it can be fixed uh but more broadly we are going to speak about social network and uh the way uh the next step of what would be the next step of f3 and whether he is headed and

18:11how we will replace uh some of these things that uh we take for granted on web 2 and because of that of course you know reptile services kind of misuse that as well so some of these things how can we perfect that in that tree uh and that's right in social network economics and uh how how to fix it um yeah that's good to know because i feel like for the majority of web 2 users a lot of

18:39their notifications at least on their phone the first thing is from their social media networks whether it's from their friends or it's just from the social media platform trying to bug them about something to get their attention so they can click the notification and get back to the platform and from what i've seen over the last six seven years there

18:56really hasn't been a web three social media network that has had the success that any of these web 2 platforms have had you know whether they've tried to work out tokenomics or financial incentives or freedom incentives there still hasn't been something that's broken through into the mainstream do you see some kind of solution in social media networks moving forward

19:24where something needs to be done to sort of break through to beyond blockchain i i don't see that like i mean the issue as a whole is about uh user friction like just to give you an example uh i i action on battery usually gets divided into 10 actions like if i want to interact with the protocol uh i cannot do it if i have

19:54just created a wallet i will probably install metamask but then i cannot do it until i get ethereum so now i will see i'll go and see how to get ethereum and then you know those steps will again go into sending the ethereum uh inside buying the uh ethereum inside exchange and sending it out and then finally i'm able to interact with it so i do feel like

20:18innovation and adoption they're like two different beasts and when we started innovating uh we knew that where we are headed and at this phase i think now we are at the point where we realize that you know we have done a lot of innovations and now it's time for adoption so i still see that you know users from web 2 to web3 they their transition should be very

20:45smooth they should not even realize that you know they have transformed and i think now we are getting there they will still take some time together but we are getting there by figuring out meta transactions by figuring out communication by figuring out you know how to do a social network right so i don't see like social network uh as a failed experiment

21:10i see it like a step-by-step like how we started with the early days of internet where then we could only download the image in two minutes or more and now we take images and real-time video for example right so uh that is what i see uh in the next five to ten years we'll be able to achieve that and uh i tie the success or the amount of user movement to adoption rather than uh

21:42innovation because you need to provide user with a really seamless user experience and ui uh for them to uh take interest in you i mean users are essentially i mean if you think about it users are like you and me we really have time to try out cool products and then really really we have time to learn about new things so if we are able to

22:10eliminate learning about new things or you know really reduce it a lot uh the user adoption will definitely uh come great insights harsh and i agree uh you can only innovate so much without anyone adopting it before you know you realize you're not really getting anywhere um and uh so when that adoption comes i think that's going to be a huge part and

22:34within the next five years there should be some kind of breakthrough in social networks and driving more people into web 3 in a way that they don't even know that it's happening so i'm looking forward to it um i'm looking forward to these updates with epns that you hinted at as well what is the best way for people to follow along uh with those updates and

22:54to start getting uh push notifications and using the platform but i mean the best way to follow updates is to go to epms.org scroll all the way down and you will see twitter but in case you want to directly go go to epns project uh at twitter or telegram but yeah we are really active on twitter or on discord so you can ask whatever scroll all the way down click on those links

23:21that's the best way out to get notifications or to see notifications in action just go to app.eto and uh and that's about it uh try to play with the app there's a live walkthrough that also explains all those things in action so yeah you can go ahead and start experiencing notifications even right now sounds great harsh i will leave those

23:47links in the description box thank you so much for taking the time all the best with epns and at the mainnet conference coming up and let's follow up in the near future thanks for having me ashley you