Wallet notifications and messaging with EPNS

Transcript

What's up, friends? Welcome to Web3 Academy, a place for entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers to explore and learn how to use Web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities. Enjoy this next episode. GM GM. Welcome to Web3 Academy. It is the weekly doer spotlight. I am your co-host, Jay Hamilton, coming at you from Whistler today. As always, I am joined by my fellow co-host, Kyle Reedhead. What's up, Kyle? Hello, fellow Web3 Academy doers. What's going on? Excited to be here today, as per usual.

Oh yeah. We are extra excited today because we have with us Jaff, who is from the EPNS team, which is solving one of the biggest UX problems in Web3. Jaff has about 20 years of experience in various software positions, plus 10 years leading tech teams at Intel, Hewlett-Packard, amongst other software companies where he was in project and product management and solution architecture. And over the past 3 years, Jaff has moved over from Web2 to blockchain, developing there.

And as I mentioned, he's now part of the EPNS team, which is really solving the one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest UX issue in Web3 around notifications and messaging. Jaff, welcome to the show. Excited to have you. Yep. Thank you so much for having me here today. As as you were saying, I've been working for quite a long time already, and it's been a fun ride, but nothing compared to what has happened to me over the past 3 years that I jumped into the crypto wagon. And it really changed everything for me. It was my first opportunity working in a in a startup.

And on top of it, a startup in the crypto space, so it has been just crazy. Small town as it gets. So, let's let's let's start there, then. Uh let's start with the last 3 years, or maybe even take us back a little bit before that. You know, how did you first go down the rabbit hole? Uh what's what's your rabbit hole story? All right, cool. Um so, yeah, I spent like my first 15 years working in in the web tool world for many different companies, many different industries, and it was actually 4 years ago that I had my first opportunity um working in a project uh that somebody

that I met like years and years ago, they they asked me if I was uh able to help them on this project. They wanted to make like a fantasy cricket league or something built on Ethereum, right? So, I said I said, "Yes, I mean, what what was the deal, right?" Uh I said, "Yes." And the project was really, really bad. It went really, really, really bad because we didn't knew that technology, we didn't knew uh pretty much we didn't know what we were doing at that moment. But, um the cool thing is that after that, it really changed everything for me because I I fell in love with the technology. Even though the project didn't go didn't do well, but I fell in love with the technology and and I started reading and reading and reading.

And I started looking for opportunities. So, I did work for for this project that was creating a solution in the identity space, and I worked there for like a year. And I I got more more interested in the technology, and uh I did met Harshinder and Harshil Bicha. They are the founders of EPNS, and we worked only for for a very short uh period of time, but it was a really, really great collaboration. And then when they started uh EPNS, they they pulled me in.

And what was it about the technology that got you excited? I think the whole the whole concept about the internet of money, I think it was the first time, like I I as I was saying, like I I worked in so many industries over the past 15 years or during my first 15 years working. And I I never had the opportunity to experience something like this where you can where you can send money as a content type, right? I was so interested in in the money side of things, not so much in in the like in everything that I that I was going to learn after, but I was so interested in in programming money,

right? That was the concept that that uh, changed everything for me. And I don't know, for those listeners who are not seeing Jazz's face, not watching this on YouTube, his smile is ear to ear. Like his passion for this stuff is next level. He's fired up. He's really excited about Web3. Yeah, I am. I am. Uh, I could tell when we went when we met at NFT NYC, you know, we we met in passing and we we could have talked for hours.

You were you were just so excited about I mean, everything that EPNS is building, but also just the energy of of Web3 in general, the space, and being part of such an innovative uh, exciting time in building, which you know, you can we can tell you're a builder. You you're a doer. You love that innovation part. And you know, one of one of the things that I that I liked about this space in general, right? The Web3 space in general, is that um, maybe I know it it was new to me, but the fact is that the more I was learning, the more I I realized I knew nothing, right? You keep running into these other people into these other people that they are so

so experts on whatever they they they know what and um when they start learning, it's you realize that there is so much more to learn because we're building the future here. So, um it's it's just beautiful. It's a never-ending rabbit hole. That's how we like to say it here in in in Web3. Jeff, I'm curious. Um first, why don't you just give us a run-through of what EPNS is, what it stands for. We haven't even mentioned that. Um and let's sort of just talk about some of the things that it's solving uh in the Web3 space. Yeah, or even compared to Web2 if if you have some more insight on that, too.

Yeah, actually um yeah, let let me let me start uh first things first. EPNS, it stands for Ethereum Push Notification Service. But, uh the thing is that that Sam is no more right now because we are not only on Ethereum, we're not only about push notifications, and it's not a service. It's a protocol. It's a protocol, right? So, we are changing that very very soon. Um but that's that that's the general concept, right? Uh notifications on Ethereum.

The thing is um and and you know, it goes hand by hand with this that we were talking about. Uh the crypto space is so interesting, but so interesting. You get You get so immersed on it that you forget the you're not used to doing the things that you're doing right now in this space. Like, nobody's used to go and check in their email 20 times a day to see if they got a new email, right? This is not the '90s when when you had to do that. Mhm. But, um in the Web2 world, let's say, users are expected um users are expecting the information to flow to them rather than you having to go fetch the information yourself. Right? And um that's what's happening in the crypto space right now. But, because it is so

interesting, we don't care. We keep visiting the same platforms over and over again 20 times a day. Depending on on the market conditions, it can be more than 20 times a day, right? So, what EPNS is coming to build is is that. What EPNS is coming to solve is is the fact that information should flow to the user rather than you go having to go fetch the information by yourself. And and the way we're doing this the ultimate use case is is enabling wallet-to-wallet communication. But, we decided to start with this other use case that is notifications because it makes a lot of sense. It's delivering information to the users that sometimes it will be very critical or it

can it can lead to a critical information drop. For instance, to start with some use cases, the very first use case that we worked is loan liquidations, right? So, if you think about it, if you have a loan in one of the in one of the DeFi platforms, um you don't know if your loan is is approaching liquidation unless you keep visiting that that application over and over, right? And under very weird market conditions like the ones we are having recently, that can happen any moment.

But, what if instead you're getting a notification to your phone as a push notification as you get any WhatsApp message or something that says, "Hey, you have a loan that that has a low health factor. You better go take a look at it because your assets are at risk." So, you click the notification and it takes you to where you need to go to rebalance or or to do whatever you can do to save your to put your assets in back to safety, right? That was our very first initial use case. But, after that moment, we have gotten so much traction in so many other um areas like governance, NFTs of course.

Uh DeFi is is something that we keep seeing more and more uh use cases daily. Uh gaming at the end when to put it in in some other way, EPNS is a protocol in service of every other protocol in the space because it brings that communication building block that was not present. Mhm. One of the things that um I noticed right away is so Jay and I with our Web3 Academy Discord, we wanted to gate it and we did it via an NFT. And so we are Web2 marketers, growth marketers, and we focused solely on like the user experience going through a sort of sales funnel or through a flow. And um you know, really what you want to do for

like an onboarding experience when someone buys a product or signs up for something is you want a really good onboarding experience for them. You want to tell them what they just bought. You want to let them know like here's what you can do with it, here's the features, and like here's how to make the most of it. And we launched this NFT that was a post to allow people into our our Discord. And we realized if they bought the NFT or they signed up and and claimed this NFT, we couldn't communicate with them. We were like, how do we talk to these people and like let them know where to go? And we're like, we we can't. And so we're like, do we need to get their email first? Like, how do we make this experience work? And like this must be true for all projects whether that's

like buying an NFT to join a community or buy an NFT to be part of a DAO or like whatever it is, they just we don't have that capability. So do you see this as something that EPNS is is fixing as well? Uh and maybe you can talk about that a little. Definitely. Over this year we have been participating a lot and and putting a big focus on on the developers community, right? Because they are the ones building the solutions that we are all going to use. And um one of the things that we have been seeing is is this precisely. What happens after an event happens, right? After like like let's say an NFT minting or or your token gated channel or anything like that where an action was performed, but it doesn't

need to end there. And right now it is ending there. You buy an NFT and it ends there. There is no way you can communicate with that NFT holder anymore. And it makes a lot of sense right now that we were in NFT NYC, um we run into this project that they do uh fractionalization of of art, right? So, what if you have 100 pieces or or you fractionalize your art in 100 pieces, you sold them, and then what if you cannot reach out to them to say, "Hey, I I I just produced another artwork. Are you interested in looking into it?"

So, this is what EPNS precisely comes to to fix because with EPNS you can send you can for instance, you can say, "Hey, I want to communicate with everybody that has this uh NFT on their wallet." And it doesn't get any more safer and direct than that because you you cannot you don't have to do any other validation except saying, "Give me the the token holders of this of Give me the wallets that hold this NFT." And it it's it's just super safe if you go like that because you know they actually have the NFT on their wallet right now. And you can send notifications. There are other cool things. The cool to action thing that I was mentioning is super interesting

because for instance, if if you're a creator, you can say, "Hey, you bought my my previous work. Come check out this one." They click the notification, and then it takes you to your gallery, right? Which makes a lot of sense because it drives uh user engagement and user retention. It shows you as an artist or you as a platform caring about your users. Makes sense? And and so I mean it makes tons of sense. So, where is this happening right now? Is Is this So, if if I want to send a notification it's obviously it's not wallet to wallet yet, right? Like this isn't built in within wallets. So how are some projects using EPNS

currently? Yeah. Um right now it's live. We have been formally live in mainnet since January this year. And uh we have been really lucky to be working with some of the biggest names in the space, right? If I yes, I was saying is is the area that got the most interest at first, right? So we have collaborations with Aave, dYdX, uh Uniswap, and every every protocol will have their different use case.

So for instance, let let me tell you about one. Um let's say in Aave. Aave is actually the use case that I was describing that if you have a loan in the Aave platform and your loan is um coming to a low health factor, then you get a notification immediately saying hey, go go fix it, right? And with with the channel that we have in Aave, we're actually observing at your Aave position in Polygon, right? So that's that's what I started saying that we are not looking at things or events happening only on Ethereum mainnet, but we can observe at events happening on other chains.

Now there there when when we started working on this, it started became more interesting um very soon, right? So for instance, the Uniswap channel uh you know, when you provide the Uniswap on on V3, uh you define a range that you are going to be providing liquidity on that range, and if you if you fall out of range, then you get a notification saying go adjust it cuz you're not earning fees right now. But then, when you start thinking it's it's not only notifications that are reactive to an event, like your loan is approaching liquidation, but it's notifications that will offer you opportunities, right? So if there is a new vault paying really, really high interest, then what if you can tell your

users, "Hey, go go join this this pool right now because it's the best moment." Mhm. Um so, it becomes a tool that will that's why I was I was being so um I was stressing that part of of the user engagement and user retention because you can do something for your users. Mhm. And right now users, we have enabled four different crypto for nets right now where you can receive these notifications. So, we have a mobile app in the two flavors, iOS and Android. We have a Chrome browser extension. We have our own app that you can go and check like a Nimbly type of thing. And we have been making a lot of tooling for the developers community for them to implement their own solutions.

Mhm. So, if if I'm an application, okay, let's say I'm Uniswap or whatever, and I want to use this, do I just like log in or maybe it's just connect my wallet probably to EPNS and then I can go and create like automated like push notifications or how does how does someone who's a builder in the space or has a project actually use this with their customers? Yes, there is how that looks. No, there is some programming involved because you need to say, "Okay, I want to monitor this event." And if this event happens, then you can even be more granular and say, "Okay, I want to monitor this event but only if it meets this criteria." Right? So, there have been

different teams that they say, "Yeah, I want to monitor this event." Let's say a market going down, right? But I want to trigger the notifications the notification only if it goes down more than 10%. Then you can play with thresholds. play with values. You can play with so many different things. But every protocol will have to do an implementation. Right? What we have been doing with all these different protocols that we have been working with is that we are working in a in a collaborative fashion where we do this together with our development team sometimes with the development team or together and we define what we're going to let the users know and we put it we create a channel and

let me get there really quick because the analogy to understand what a channel is is if you're a musician then you want your followers to subscribe to your channel to receive notifications from you every time you post a new song or something so this is the same thing here you're subscribing to the channels so that you can receive any communication that they want to send to you and just to shift topic a little bit NFTs is is very interesting because we have been getting a ton of attention from the from the NFTs um marketplaces and whatnot lately but it's because there are so many interesting things like if you're participating if you're participating any of the NFT

marketplaces there are different things that right now you're not being aware of because you're not giving away your email or or visiting the platform consistently right so what if you got an offer for your NFT that you have on your wallet you'll never know until you visit the platform or even worse what if you are participated in an you're participating in an auction and you were outbid and how would you know and like you're participating because you actually want that NFT but what if instead you get a notification and you click the notification then it takes you back to action does at the current moment anyway do I have

to go into EPNS and subscribe to these specific apps to say like hey I want to receive these or like if I buy an NFT that has a channel already is it auto subscribed to it or how does how does that work? Yeah. Right now there is one action one action that every user needs to perform and is opting in to receiving notifications from your favorite platform. Why? Because that's our very first spam control mechanism. That means that any platform like platforms cannot send you communication just because they want cuz that will be running into the same spamming practices that we all know from the web 2 world, right?

Um that leads me to to a more complex topic which is our our spam control mechanisms. This is the very first one but that doesn't mean that a platform cannot communicate to you or reach out to you. They can reach out, right? And they can send you communication, they can send you information but they will go to your spam box. If you get something in the spam box, you can still see it but they will not trigger any notification or anything like that. So you can see it and you can say, "Yeah, this would have made sense for me if I gotten this one on time."

And you can opt in from that notification, but unless you mark your intent of allowing this platform to communicate with you, then they cannot do that directly. And this is in the EPNS app not in like let's say a MetaMask wallet or something. That is actually a protocol level which means that it's a feature that everybody will have no matter how they implement their solution, right? Um so any other platform that will come and implement EPNS notifications they know that they cannot run into spamming practices so easily because the actual protocol will prevent that from happening.

Right. Right. I want to come back to the spam issue in a sec but we'll we'll come back to that later. So so right now in order for me to receive notifications, I would have to go download the the app or use the EPNS Chrome extension, correct? And then once I have that So, I have to go because I guess what's so interesting about when you build a protocol is you also You can't just build a protocol nothing. You need to build the app layer and on top of the protocol. So, right now it sounds like you guys are building the protocol, but you're also building the first apps to

be used and then you're also reaching out to and educating the services, the Uniswaps, the DAOs, the NFT projects to say, "Hey, you can use this and here's how." So, there is There's a lot of steps here that need to happen in order to get this into the hands of of a user actually receiving notifications. Yeah. And and and yeah, I realize now that I didn't uh formally answer your question. Um but correct. Right now, we are making the implementation of these notifications.

Now, you asked before, Kyle, that uh what happens like if you buy an NFT if if you're automatically going to get the notifications. Right now, what we are offering is creating more tooling for the developers so that they can make this a more smooth process, right? So, you go and buy an NFT, for instance, you're not automatically subscribed to receiving notifications um because you bought that NFT. But, platforms can start integrating the opt-in functionality within their own apps so that they don't have to come to app.epns.io because it doesn't make sense to take users away from from their platform to take them to other place.

Um so, that is something that we are seeing a lot right now. But, still you get that other option that the protocol will allow you to send notifications or communication um to token holders if it makes sense. And um it's just that they will go to the to the spam box unless you opted into receiving notifications. But, that opted That opting into receiving notification is something that can be integrated with it within any dApp right now. And we are seeing it more and more with uh the protocols that are implementing EPNS.

Interesting. Do you You know what I This kind of reminds me of what I see is So, in the Web 2 world, whenever we build a business or work with clients, they have a CRM, right? And usually it's like an active campaign or something like that where they can collect their emails and their data of their users, and then they can, you know, either broadcast messages out to everybody or they can do automations depending on things they do on their website or things they do with their product. Um and you can like build kind of unique flows and communication sequences for your customers. And it seems like EPNS is basically building the protocol for that in Web 3, except for the fact that you're I'm assuming you're not really collecting any user data. So, you're doing all the things that a CRM

would do, you're just not collecting and storing all that data centrally. Is that correct? You got it You got it right. We're not storing any data whatsoever. Right? And and when I when I was talking uh when I was talking about um like sending notifications to every every holder of this NFT on their wallet, uh even like that is is you will say programmer you would you would say, "Okay, give me the list of all wallets that have this this NFT." But, that's a dynamic thing. I mean, if you if you sell your NFT and you send it to another wallet, then it will not show up the next time this notification uh is sent because you will not have it on your wallet. That means that we're not storing data at all.

And it doesn't get any safer than that. There is no risk uh in anything because we are just relaying the information from one place to another. Mhm. Mhm. Man, I'm so fired up about this. There's so many ideas that I have immediately. So, one one one uh uh use case that I have I heard you talk about was the example of the only current way to communicate is through Discord, really, right? You know, that's the main tool that these projects are using, which is an absolute nightmare because Discord has thousands of people in most Discord servers, and it's impossible to keep up with it all. It's just like a flowing river like at the you know, it's a mass It's the Mississippi River flowing

through it. If you're not there at that moment, then you miss it, right? And like you can't go back and read every single message to figure it out. So, so I've heard you talk about how when um Bored Ape Yacht Club's Discord got hacked, they weren't able to to notify their their NFT holders that they got hacked, and it led to I think it was like 200 ETH of stolen assets from various wallets because once they got hacked, the hackers acted like the mods and said, "Oh, click this link." And blah blah blah, right? But if you had notification, well, and and you had wallet-based notification, then you could instantly notify all those people, "Hey, this has happened. We You know

that this is confirmed because we're messaging you from a wallet to a wallet, so it's it's immutable. It's trustworthy." And you could eliminate a lot of a lot of those scam issues as well that are happening in Discords. Yeah. No, you you get it, right? And um as I was saying, since we have uh started going to hackathons and stuff, we have seen developers like raising more more interest in in this, like building the the Web3 Discord. It's just that these tools are centralized tools that are subject to many different sorts of attacks. And even sometimes not even an attack, but what if if uh one of these platforms, they just decide to ban a geographical location or ban a group

of people or ban whatever. They can ban, and that shouldn't be the case, right? The equivalent that that we can have or that we can think that we can have is governance, but governance is so much a more fair solution to to this, right? So, what if you build a solution that you know, you have a channel that is already communicating a lot of things, but that channel becomes a bad actor. It's sending bad content, right? Um so, governance can at that moment jump in and take a decision saying, "No, you're being a bad actor. You're going to start getting throttled down in your notification capabilities until you go to zero unless you pivot into good behavior."

But, creating those conditions where you can put groups together and give them very trustworthy communication channels, it's it's a use case by itself. A big, huge, gigantic super important use case, right? Yeah. Um there's so many features. Like, obviously communication is needed. We just it's non-existent in Web 3. Uh so, I think we can go on forever with use cases. I'm curious. I I I always talk about this with people in the Web 3 space of like, "How are we going to communicate? Is it wallet to wallet? Is it integrating emails into wallet? Like, is it some other form?" Like, I don't know. And I'm just curious, why do you think that like, I guess EPNS right now is not going to your wallet

specifically, but it seems like that's the way that it's going to go or maybe it's just notifications direct to your phone. I'm not quite sure. But, like what about integrating something like email into it? Like, we all use email to communicate. It is a also a protocol. Um like, is there room for that or why why is it this route do you think is the way we're going to go? Yeah, no. As I was saying, um what we're building is a protocol that is flexible enough so that it can serve any purpose, right? And during this this experience that we have been having with the different hackathons, one thing that we have been seeing is developers developing solutions. For instance, if you're getting a notification to your wallet address, you also want to receive it in Telegram because they are really, really good with Telegram. Or email, or

WhatsApp, or anything that can come to your mind. But, uh that's why we at EPNS as a team, what we are developing is more features to the protocol that will allow you to to be more flexible and more creative in the notifications that you can develop. But, it's 100% doable. And when you start thinking about our mobile app, which is one of our crypto finance, uh when you start thinking about it, then that is the very same case, right? Because we are using the only way that you can communicate with with uh an Android device, which is through Google Firebase.

Uh we are using that bridge to communicate with them. So, if you want to build a bot that will still send you a message to your Discord or or to your Telegram, you can communicate with the different pieces that you need to communicate and deliver that package of information so that it gets delivered to your tool of preference. Interesting. Open protocols are the best. Composability allow you to integrate with everything cuz we all communicate in different ways. Some people use Telegram and love it. I don't really use it often, but everyone's like, "Can we just chat on Telegram?" Like, "Damn it." And so, like, if there's just a tool that connected them all where I could choose the one I want, they could choose the one they want, and like that's how it speaks to people, that's amazing. I love that.

And and one Sorry. And one really interesting thing that we have been seeing is is how um you know, based on the wallet activities, right? There is so much that your wallet activity tells about you as a person. So, if you take a look at the my wallet for instance, then you can say, "Yeah, this person is into DeFi, but not into NFTs." Or this person is all into gaming and play-to-earn and things like that. But, based on the wallet activity, you can identify the profile of the user more or less.

And you can take that opportunity to deliver notifications that are more targeted to my activities, right? So, you know that if I was if I was participating in three different DeFi DeFi platforms or protocols, that I will very likely be you know, willing to participate in a in another DeFi platform. But, they are not going to send me anything about governance. But, that's the thing. The protocol is so generic that it will allow you to to serve any purpose that you want. So, whether that's marketing things that you want to that you want to work on or if it's some more other things like governance proposals and stuff like that, which is also a

very very interesting topic. Hearing this whole like, okay, we can learn about the user and we can do things specific to the user, just makes me think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're going to learn about the users, we're going to run ads. Which is like, hey, I'm an advertiser, so I don't really care. I'm more than happy. I think ads can be really great if they're good ads. But, I'm curious, how does this not end up being the same thing? Like, how do we know that EPNS or whatever builds on top of it isn't going to go and like like maybe I go to an NFT project and say, "Hey, I have all these users using my app. Pay me this amount and I'll just and I'll send them these messages that are, you know, highlighting your app."

Like, that's basically what Facebook does. How do we How do we prevent that? Or or maybe we just That is the way it goes and that's just that's just how marketplaces work. Like, I don't know. What do you think? Well, I I think it goes it goes hand-in-hand with the anonymity that the the crypto brings, right? And it goes very very aligned to what I was saying about the activity that your wallet that you can see on your wallet tells a lot about you. But, it could happen. It could happen, right? It's just that what if instead like if you start if I start getting ads that I know are are because somebody that I gave permissions in the past and they they started like

tracking my behavior and whatnot. I can just say, "Nah, I'm I'm opting out. I don't want to do anything with you cuz you run into very bad practices that I don't like, right?" Um so, you can do that. But again, I go to the to the topic of governance. Uh governance is is everybody. It's everybody. Every token holder are our token, it's called push token. It's a governance token that will give you uh governance rights aside from from another thing. Um but anybody can post a proposal and say, "No, this channel is selling your information or taking advantage of your information for their purposes, right?"

And if governance decide that that channel needs to be shut down, then it's governance. Right. And And I guess in this instance, we have the choice to turn off the notification or not. Whereas in Facebook and Instagram, you don't have a choice. You're going to If you want to use the platform, you have to see those ads. So, it's a very very different dynamic. Interesting. Um Okay, so we talked a lot about like notifications and like communicating with let's say customers or people interacting. The other thing I see a lot um and there seems to be a lot of activity on this is wallet-to-wallet like messaging. Like I think I saw it's called Dialect maybe, they're on Solana, but they're like talking about doing group chats like in your wallets.

Um is this something that EPNS is thinking about of like actually just like, you know, taking over the next WhatsApp but in the Web3 world and we're doing it through wallets? Or like what's uh what are you guys thinking on that network? Yeah. No, that's that's a super interesting topic. You're You're touching one of the topics that I'm more more interested in. Wallet-to-wallet is coming. Uh if you take a look at the roadmap that we released back in January, wallet-to-wallet was supposed to come late in the year, by by the end of year, but we shifted priorities a little bit and now it's coming much earlier. Like so, we're coming with wallet-to-wallet very soon.

Uh we're going to enable wallet-to-wallet like let's say person to person communication at first and then we're going to enable this other um type of communication where I can send a message to a group of people, right? Which is more like like the old chats that we used to see. Um that is coming, but why this topic is so exciting? Because how are we going to ensure that um that this is this remains an open protocol that everybody can participate and that it will have the scalability that we need to support the traffic that WhatsApp is supporting right now, right?

Cuz you don't want to send a message and then wait 15 minutes for it to get to the other side, right? Um so we have this this network of nodes that we put together. We call it the push nodes. Um basically those are nodes in charge of retrieving and dispatching notifications where they need to be. But any person that wants to become part of this network and spin their own node and provide that service of retrieving and dispatching to the network can just spin their own node and start participating and getting everything that comes with with the spinning a node so that they can get rewards or you know, if they if they are not uh a good actor then you know, there there might be slashing as well.

We're still defining some of these things, but the fact that you know, the the whole the whole wallet to wallet communication thing, we got it solved. It's uh ensuring ensuring that scalability is there to support good uh performance and every communication that we sent is also as critical, right? Um so we are keeping everything in parallel. There are so many things going in parallel right now that by the moment we release this this first uh version of wallet to wallet communication, we're going to be uh very solid at that moment.

So is this something Sergey? I'm just going to ask this one question and then you can you can run with it. Um uh is this something then you build a protocol for wallet-to-wallet messaging, but you guys aren't a wallet. So, is this like does MetaMask and you know, whatever else out there, they have to then go and like implement your build or your protocol into their wallet or are you guys going to launch your own wallet or like does this does this work across all wallets? Like how does that how does that actually work? You you stole my question. Now, you have to think of another one.

No, um let let me let me tell you what's happening. Um so, if you if you take a look in our website, that's epns.io. Uh you'll see that we're working with so many of the different uh most important protocols in the space, right? Um so, it's making more interest for wallets to start integrating EPNS notifications and create this one-stop shop for for all of us as users cuz you will have your wallet services together with your messaging or information services in one single place. And it doesn't get any better than that. Right now, there is no such thing as a as a centralized or as let me not use that word, as a central part where you can go and and verify all your communication from all your different protocols. So, a

wallet is perfect because you're already using that wallet to go play against 10 different platforms. Um right now, there are many wallets that are um that we are in conversations with that they are having interest in in implementing EPNS notifications as a part of their offering, right? Uh there is an implementation that needs to uh to be done and especially with wallets, it's a process that it needs to be super super careful right? But right now, what we are envisioning is that very soon, wallets will start uh giving you notifications in the wallet itself so that uh you can react to events from the wallet.

Mhm. This is what's so Sorry, keep going, Jeff. No, yeah, I was going to mention one one really one of these cases that I love the most. Uh governance. I I've said governance so many times so you you might uh you might know already that I love governance. Um But governance, what if like let me tell you this use case. Um what if you belong to a DAO? You you really are into this project. You really care about what's happening with this project. So they put a proposal, right now. But governance happens in a ton of places. So you can see the conversations going on in Discord. You can see conversations going on in Discord, Telegram, Slack, right? It happens in

too many places. But what if instead you can get a notification on your phone or your wallet saying like there is this new proposal up for voting right now and it's important, right? And right now very soon in the future we're going to enable the fact that or the capability for you to cast a vote from the notification itself. So you will be able to do that as a part of the protocol. But in the future when there are more wallets that integrate EPNS notifications, you will have so much more room for more actions because you it's not going to be only casting a vote for a proposal. But what if you can say now I want to rebalance this portfolio because I'm in danger.

It's a it's amazing to think about the the steps that need to happen for a protocol to to grow an ecosystem. So where I'm curious where you think this goes. Is it Is this going to stay in wallet or is this Is there somebody building a WhatsApp of Web3? Is anybody doing that right now? Are we going to have our own messaging Web3 app? tell you that. I can tell you that. It's already happening.

We've seen it in the in the hackathons. I've seen it in conversations that I've had with different teams. They're building discords. They're building like web3 discords. They're building WhatsApps as you're saying. So, everything that we all know that we use right now in, you know, in our day-to-day life, it's going to happen in a web3 fashion. But, the cool thing is that it will be encrypted information. It's you know, well, some of the information in the crypto space is public, your interactions are not. Right? So, you can receive a notification about a loan or something like that.

That's public information that is available in many of the different platforms, but nobody can tie that to you. Right? And that's part of the of the beauty of of EPNS as a protocol that it goes hand-in-hand with the web3 ethos of protecting privacy. Right? You don't have to give away anything any information whatsoever that can uh link you to to your personal identity. Right? Um but, yeah, to answer your question, all these all these things that you mentioned are in the building right now cuz we've seen it. Is we keep saying the word protocol and I and I love it because I I I love protocols. They're I think this is like the game changer of web3 in in my opinion. Is EPNS currently like fully a decentralized protocol or is it

something you guys are like looking to kind of do like progressively or did you start from the very beginning that way? No, it's it's going to be a progressive effort. In part because um you know, sometimes when when you're when you're growing and when you're growing a a product, you have to take decisions. Right? You have to drive some of the decisions yourself with the team in order to get to to a good sound product. Um and then you have to start opening the floor for more people to contribute. We are in our deification process, if it if it makes sense to use that word. Um and it's cool because part of what we're doing right now is we're in an education process where we are telling the

community let's learn to vote. Let's let's see what's voting, what the what are the consequences of good and bad voting, right? So, we're starting with more light proposals right now, but we are running into into our phase two of of governance where we are going to start making more decisions that have an impact in the protocol itself. But um in the future the protocol or the governance around the protocol will have so much power to take decisions that we expect that by then we're going to have um a process completed, an education process completed with our community that will tell us, okay, these are the

the people that they have been involved in the protocol for so long time. They know what they are talking about. They have been involved. Um and you know, we we are creating all these roles, uh the push delegates, the push ambassadors, so many different roles that need to happen for good governance. Um when that moment comes the decentralization is is going in parallel with it. Um there is this uh thing about the push notes that I was mentioning that plays a big important role because everybody, like you, me, and anybody can uh spin their own node and participate giving that service to the network.

And um it goes hand by hand, you know, like the governance thing with uh the infrastructure that needs to happen to support the entire operation of the protocol. Uh it's going to be a process. Yeah. And why decentralize? I mean, you kind of touched on it there a couple things, but like, you know, centralized means faster, right? You can just make decisions and it's great, especially in startup mode. And um you know, we've had a lot of people on the podcast that are sort of in that stage, but everyone's kind of working towards decentralization. To you, why is that? Is that because, like you said, when we have a bunch of nodes, it can create a better service that like can't get shut down, I guess, in terms of messaging?

Um or is it I mean, there's also on the governance side, maybe it's just you want it to be community led, but like, what is it about decentralization that makes you guys go, "Oh, we definitely need to go there." What's the pro there? I think the the main thing for us is is creating unstoppable and unstoppable pro protocol right? Mhm. Um if if there is a company behind a a project, what if that company got in gets into trouble, right? The whole thing can be shut down from one day to the other. Um to me, that's that's the biggest value. The whole thing about governance is is more in the management side of things, like how are you going to manage and take the decisions that will affect your protocol. But, looking for the decentralization

together with the nodes, together with the governance, together with all the different uh things that need to happen to to achieve decentralization, it's all about creating an unstoppable product that is not owned by anybody and is not in risk because somebody is uh not acting well, let's say. And I guess if the goal of the product is to be almost like an API, right? Where others are going to build on top of it, like you want MetaMask to build on top of EPNS, and you want whatever other wallets to build on top of it, they're not going to do that if there's a centralization factor, right? Or they might do it, but they're like, "Ah, there's a big risk here." This is the protocol sink thesis. We talk about it a lot. But, the more that you decentralize, the more that you become

this unstoppable thing, that's actually a feature of your product, right? And that is what enables all these other companies to want to plug in to your protocol and build on top of that. So, it's almost like it's a requirement long term, I think, to to achieve the goal that EPNS wants to. Exactly. Um it is it is I would I would put it the same requirement myself as well because uh what you're saying is is completely true. If if you want This will sound crazy, but if you want to trust a protocol, you have to trust that you're not trusting a somebody, but you're trusting everybody right?

Mhm. So, yeah, to me you you you put it right. To me it's a requirement. One thing I always I'm trying to figure out from my my business mind goes to revenue. So, if if you're creating a protocol, what's what's the business model? Is is there a revenue? Does there need to be revenue? I mean, I think you guys have a team of 40 people, right? Like there. You know, so it's and I know you guys I I believe in maybe go back to the origin. I believe you came out of an Ethereum hackathon, so maybe you're funded by the Ethereum Foundation and maybe that's where I don't know. Take us through the business model.

That's that's a good question. Yes, we were we were born out of ETH Global's Hack Money 2020 hackathon, right? That's where the project started, which is really great. We just had a Twitter Spaces where we discussed about we talked about the journey, right? And all the help that we received because when you when you go into a hackathon, it's not only about participating to get a prize or something, but it's about all the help, all the visibility that it gives you and all the networking that you can do to meet the right people, right? So, after the hackathon, we started um like running into all these people that decided to help just because they they were there and they had the knowledge to help.

And we're here, right? But uh to go back to the original question, the revenue model, um right now it's 100% free to use. You can set up your own channel. You can start sending notifications to your user base 100% free. It will be free like for more or less a year, more, right? Why? Because after a year, um then governance will be formally in place. We will formally have a a good governance uh together and um there will be a service fee by then.

But, we're going to go with a freemium model that will allow you to send notifications up to some level. And then, if you surpass that level, then there there's going to be tiers. The only thing is that we are still not um we're still working on on the details. We are still what's going to be the game theory around it. Everything has game theory in the Web3. Um and the cool thing is we have even been suggested some things by our our own collaborations, right? They are so interested in in participating in the development of the protocol that they suggest things. So, the other day I was in a conversation and they and they said, "What if if when I create a channel, I spin a node? So, I would be providing the service of distributing and dispatching notifications to the

to the network. I will get rewards because I'm spinning my node. And what if those rewards offset the cost of operations for my channel, right? So, there are different alternatives in there. And one other thing that I didn't mention before, but it's really really cool, is that our push token is not only a governance token, but it has a really cool feature, um as well. It's fee split. When we enable service fees, if you're a token holder, you'll be entitled to to get a share of of the fees collected by the protocol.

Right? Again, Watch out for the alpha. Watch out for the alpha. But again, again, you see, those are things that when you start thinking about a DAO taking decisions over the protocol, the DAO has to be really really well educated to take decisions that will not have a negative impact on the protocol. Because what if they say, "Now, we're going to charge a lot of money because we want a lot of money, right?" Then it can ruin everything. That's why we are taking things slow but steady with our governance, educating everybody that wants to participate in this process, and going stage by stage, getting more more serious at each at each stage.

And is the idea one of the things I see quite often is so you let's say you're going to charge a membership fee or a subscription fee or whatever to to use the service, do you integrate the token into that somehow or like you need to own a certain amount of push tokens to use the service or will it be like you just you know, you pay with ether with like USDC or something or like what's the thought on like I'm just always interested to see how protocols specifically are going to charge for their services in their own token, is it in a different token or is it in fiat which would make zero sense, but just curious.

No, no, it's not going to be a fiat. It's it's it it just makes a lot of sense to use our own token as much as possible because of this added value that I was that I was talking about. And there is this other thing, when we when we structure things with the smart contracts originally, there is this one thing that whenever you want to create a channel, you have to put some funds on stake. In with the previous version, those funds were going to be put to generate interest and then that interest was going to be split among the subscribers of the channel.

We pivoted from that idea in order to go gasless and to go multi-chain, right? But still the idea of of staking some funds when you create your channel makes a lot of sense more like for an anti-civil mechanism that you cannot get attacks, right? So if there is something that you need to do, that extra something that you need to put on stake when you create a channel, it will prevent bad actors to come and just start Right. spamming channels. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, you mentioned I wanted to come back wrap around to the spam problem and and how you guys are solving that.

What's the what's the plan for that and how do we how do we save the world from spam? Please please do that for us. All right, this this one is interesting. So again because of our our intent of becoming decentralized right as much as possible. One of the things is the very first control or anti-spam control that we have is that that you have to opt in and you have to mark your intent that you allow a service to communicate with you. That's the But then we're working on a algorithmic implementation of spam controls that if you start running into spammy practices then the algorithm the algorithmic implementation itself

will start throttling down your notifications in speed that you can send notifications or even in the amount of notifications that you can send. If you pivot into good behavior then you're back to normal. If you don't then you are going to be throttled down until you go to zero and you cannot send anything. And at that moment there might be other slashing that can happen because you got up to you know all the way to that level and again we go to the governance topic. What if it was a mistake? It was not spam. It was just something that happened. Maybe there was a a big spike in the market that caused a lot of notifications to be sent out.

So there there are cases and cases and cases and that's why a good solid governance needs to be in place for for this. It's I this is not a question. I'm just noticing here is like when you're going to build a product in web 3 like you don't just have to know about the product and user experience. It's like you got to learn about tokenomics. You got to learn about governance. You got to learn about like all these things like all in one it's cuz we're working on building something with a a that we just launched as well. And it's just like the amount of different things you need to understand in web 3 is just it's amazing, but this is why I call it the never-ending uh rabbit hole. It's it's It's unbelievable.

And and there's no playbook. Right? You got to You got to do this when you're looking around saying, you know, anybody anybody know how to do this? Oh wait, nobody's done this before. Or maybe somebody's been doing it for 6 months and that's the expert, right? But then but then you find you find these these protocols like like I think EPN does does it that they do one tiny thing, but they specialize on it, they do it very well, and that's how they become building blocks, right? Because you can just say, "Yeah, I need this."

And you plug it in, you're done. Right. Right. Whatever product you build moving forward, you don't need to build a notifications thing. Like every website we build, we have like core sites and membership sites and we're like, "We got to go and integrate all these different things and build in the notifications and blah blah blah." And it's like, now it's just all done for you. You got one one thing, just plug it in and away you go. It's perfect. You You see, you mentioned you mentioned membership and membership is something that goes hand by hand so well with notifications because memberships expire or memberships uh are awarded after something happens, but the expiration thing with memberships is very interesting because um you know, you never keep an eye on those things and you don't want to keep

uh setting up reminders on your Google calendar or something like that. Right. To know that to know that you you you got to renew a payment or something like that, but instead, if you get notifications, um you will you will uh know about it. Right now, our most popular channel is the ENS domains channel. Uh that's up in the list because it it has so many people subscribed. So, instead of you setting reminders about your ENS domains that you have attached to your wallet, 7 days before your domains are coming to expiration, you're starting to get notifications. Say, "This is about to expire. You want to do something? This is about to expire. If you renew, you won't get the notification again.

Mhm. Super smart. Very helpful. I'm going to go go sign up for that notification immediately. Yeah, right. So, we talked a lot of about a lot of things that EPNS is doing. Uh why don't you give us a bit Well, as much as you can, what's the road map look like over the next whatever? If it's maybe it's next year, maybe you guys have built up the next 5 years. Like, I don't know. But, walk us through the journey of like what we're going to see over the next coming however long. As much as you can tell us. I I always I always try to stay away from what's happening in 1 year because I I would need like a crystal ball or something right?

1 year in crypto is too much, right? Um but, I can tell you what's happening uh for the course of of the rest of this year right? Okay. Or what you want to see happen. Maybe it's not for sure going to happen, but or what you like hope to see happen in a year or five. Okay, that makes things interesting. All right, let let let me tell you let me tell you what will happen and then um I'm going to tell you what I would what I would like to see happen. Um one of the things is is um wallet-to-wallet in all its variations, right? Uh like recipient to recipient. And I say recipient because it can be persons or it can be smart contracts communicating. Can be anything. It's It's just about establishing a communication channel between two

recipients. Um then the other uh flavor of com- of wallet-to-wallet communication, which is me in a in like in a public chat type of thing where I send a communication and it gets received by so many people. We're talking about the encrypted communication safety all the way. Um one other thing is uh these the push notes they're going to be made public, so everybody can um join the network and provide that service. Um we are also working on um the notification part that I was saying because again it's it's it goes hand by hand with everything that we're going to do with our decentralization.

And uh what would I like to see happening? I like my favorite my favorite thing is gaming gaming and and metaverse uh to be honest. Uh I I I love dials. I That's probably the topic that I that I uh learned the most most of the thing. But uh when it comes to games I I just I can spend hours and hours gaming, right? And um one of the things that I that I would like to see is is uh more use of notifications in the metaverse but in clever fashions like like what if uh people can start implementing games where you can send coordinates um for people to join you at that specific uh event or something like that or go

into a hunt like a Pokémon type of thing. Uh but those things are yet to be seen, right? For now you can envision receiving notifications like hey I'm in this concert. Want to join me? And you get a notification 1 second later you're right next to your friend, right? Um But yeah, to me that's that's that's one of the things that I Yeah. You could probably build in the like you want to join me? I'll buy your ticket and they click yes and it immediately takes like immediately takes the the ETH out of the friend's wallet and buys them the NFT ticket to just get right in. that'd be amazing.

Come dinner with me. Yeah yeah yeah. Okay, bef- before uh before we wrap up and I know we could go forever here so I think we're going to have to have a part two of this podcast in in the next I I would say in the next 6 months but maybe it's only 2 months because things are starting to happen so fast. Uh but I I I want to give you a chance Jeff to give a little bit of your show of you know I know So you guys have a grants program. Uh I know that you guys are really doing a lot for the developers in the ecosystem to help them build. So please share a little bit about how people can get involved, whether they be developers or whether they just be builders in another way.

Yeah. Let Let me go into the grants program thing because that's super interesting right now. We have $1 million allocated to supporting projects that are implementing EPNS notifications and exposing users to receiving EPNS notifications and and all the power that it brings. Right? So if you have a cool project that maybe you already have a user base or you're building it, but you can post your proposal, you can submit your proposal for a grant. It's a super fast process. It takes less than 2 weeks to get approved and everything. And you'll get all the support from from EPNS. So one cool thing that we're doing is that we

we take you hand by hand through the entire process. So if you if you're building your project, we're inviting you to office hours to share with the community about your project so that you can get feedback immediately with the community. Um and you know, we go with you all all the way to to the end. Aside from from Push Grants, we're opening more opportunities for people to join our our community in different roles, right? Um so we're making some some more implementations towards structuring our DAO better.

Um and when it comes to that point that we are that we're ready to to launch the news about how you can participate, we're going to do that very very soon, but there are many different ways that you can participate. And we also have this program that we call Rockstars of EPNS. It's a weekly thing, but if you are an um not only developer, but if you are a community member that is providing value to EPNS, you can submit your proposal that you participated in in this uh in this week's uh Rockstars of EPNS and you'll you'll get an NFT that is made by by Indian artists, right? Really cool NFTs.

And uh it comes with 900 push tokens with the NFT. So, it's a it's a pretty good deal. Uh that's ongoing. We we want to participate more in hackathons. Uh we have been participating in three hackathons in like real events in real life events this year. And each of those hackathons we have been uh getting better and better numbers in terms of uh project submissions and whatnot. So, it's it's turning to be really really interesting. That's awesome.

So many exciting ways to get involved and I love how much you guys are I mean $1 million in grants is incredible. Uh I'm still amazed at how you have that money to give. Not sure where that comes from. I guess maybe the Ethereum Foundation, I don't know, but fascinating. Fascinating. We'll talk about that in round two of the podcast. Just a their whole treasury in Dogecoin and sold the top, so that's Yeah right. They discovered us. Just a few speed round questions to finish off. Uh always like to give our our our audience a chance to get to know you a bit better more on the personal level.

Uh so, what's one NFT that you will never sell? Uh my ENS. That's an easy one. I one of my ENS domains. That is that is an easy easy one. Do you have many ENS domains? I happen to have many. Yeah, I I became crazy for for ENS domains and yeah, I do have many. I'm actually surprised no one's answered that question. There no one's done that answer yet cuz we ask them all the time and that's of course, it makes so much sense. Yeah. Uh something you've purchased recently for under $100 that brings you joy. Does not have to be crypto related.

It doesn't have to be crypto related. I I've I've been very much into reading and books and stuff. And so it when I went to New York, I bought these two books. The Edward Snowden one and and then this one. You cannot see it but they are blurred. But they are like $30 each and they I love them. I I can Sorry, what was the what was the second book? Uh it's called Homo Deus. Homo Deus. Oh yeah, yeah. Great book. Yeah. A great book, yeah. Uh Sorry about that. No, no, no problem.

If you had a billboard to get a message out to a billion people, what would you write on that billboard? Oh wow, that's an interesting one. Um Yeah, that's a weird question that you asked. This reveals a little bit of of myself but it would be go do sports. Okay. Love it. And is sports gaming or is sports No, I'm I'm talking about in real life. I do a lot of biking and swimming and and yeah. Okay.

So meet meet Jeff in the metaverse or meet him on the road in the on the pavement cycling around Costa Rica. it. You got it. Awesome. This has been amazing, Jeff. Thank you so much for the time, for your insight, for your intellect, like and thanks for building in the space and being such a leader. We we need more like you. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you so much. To be honest, since since we met in in New York, it was already a great conversation to have and this is just amazing that that you guys invited me and you made it so easy. I mean, I I I thought we had more time but you know, past the hour already.

Thanks so much, Jeff. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Have a great one. Thank you for listening to Web3 Academy. We hope this helps you along your Web3 journey. And if it does, please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. By the way, if you have yet to join the Discord community, you are missing out. This is where all the magic happens. This is where we learn, where we ask questions, where we network. Uh you want to be in there. The link to join is in the description below. And finally, a quick disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast was financial advice. Crypto and Web3 can be risky. You can literally lose it all. In fact, if you invest on account of what we say, you probably will lose it all. So, don't do that. In all honesty, the point of this

podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway. So, you should not take any of this as financial advice. Thank you, friends, and see you in the next one.