How We Got Here: What is Ethereum Push Notification Service - Richa Joshi

well up next we have richa she's coming in from epns and we're really excited to listen to her present today on how we got here what is the theory and push notification service richa how are you today hi shannon i'm great how are you great we're happy to have you back so excited to listen to present i'm going to let you uh take the floor awesome thank you so much um all right i'm just going to share my screen got it go ahead perfect uh hi everyone i am richard i am really excited to be here at denver and thanks for the invite a little bit about me i'm the co-founder of ethereum push certification service uh i'd have been doing a lot of things including marketing growth and a bit on the product side as well uh yesterday hush who's the founder was also here uh explaining game theory and d5 so yep uh both are pretty excited to be here uh cool so what are we solving and what is the theorem push notification service so basically uh we uh started ideating about this idea when we thought that you know in uh in web 2 every action that was happening was basically a notification whether it was your payments or a facetime call or what whatsapp messages everything was driven by notification but when you're researching and exploring the pain points in blockchain you notice that there was this uh gap where a user had to go back to a service to see uh you know if the important updates or any important action they committed uh occurred or not so basically there was no communication uh link and that's when we felt that notifications are integral part of this uh ecosystem and which is what was missing example a lot of very loan liquidations a new governance proposal or a desk order that is completed so there was no way for a service to you know inform a user that something like that actually occurred uh we created a ethereum push notification service uh so basically that's the solution that we offer so what it is it's basically decentralized communication protocol that can send notifications to user now since it's web3 it's a wallet address in our case uh other than being a notification protocol we kind of did two cool things over here and innovated one that notifications were incentivized uh when i say incentivize it basically means the user earns a passive earning uh with the passive earnings basically by uh us taking lending and interest generation and also notifications can be delivered to any uh any platform so it's not just either use a smartphone it can be a wallet it can be um your sma your uh browser or any tablet but the end goal is actually that you know the uh notifications uh get delivered to the user's wallet and for example metamask or trust um touching upon some of the important use cases so like i mentioned like in d5 uh you know loan liquidation interest changes whether it's a new crypto kitty auction which is out a lottery pool together your domain expiration at ens anything and everything can probably use epns and a notification at this point of time awesome so uh i actually i'm very excited about this portion of my presentation which is actually a journey um and i wanted to share uh the journey uh by the means of a tweet and that's how we kind of have timelined it so here it goes um so how epns came about so we started dabbling into the idea of uh you know what we can build and the missing piece that we wanted to uh build and that was in early january last year uh with that you know with the very raw idea we wrote to ethereum foundation and the response that we got back from the ethereum foundation completely blew us uh it was a very personalized and detailed uh explanation on what we can build how we can build all the resources and links that we can use and that really motivated us at that point of time my founder and myself to think about that this is what we want to build and uh they motivated us to actually go and build it out and hack it out at global hack money that was happening last year uh so that was the journey of apns and how we actually got started there so at ed global we met a lot of amazing builders mentors web3 leaders who really polished the idea and worked with us uh including the incentive mechanism so a short story there is like we were uh planning to have the incentive mechanism and standing from our way was like that you know this is a good idea if you build it i would personally use it so like when sandy says something that you know he would use it so you were like yeah we need to make it happen uh along with that we also wanted to work on the incentive mechanism and we really brainstormed with the away team on creating the rough and the uh and the incentive mechanism for the protocol and i think we owe them a big uh thank you for that and uh towards the end of the uh global we had a prototype ready uh working prototype for epns protocols that was one of the first stages of our project uh later on we knew that you know once we have a prototype we want to polish the project not just from our perspective from also a user perspective that's when we were selected for the idea collab uh product validation so that basically was uh a an exercise uh for like top 30 d5 teams that were selected and there is when we learned how to sort of uh understand the user feedback synthesize the idea and sort of incorporate that into products so you have a product not just for yourself but something that others are going to actually use uh it was great uh also very taxing because it was four a.m in the morning india time and we had like a lot of caffeine in the middle but i think it was all worth it um moving on uh so after uh ideo we wanted to still build the product but at the same time we knew that uh we have a alpha uh you know alpha product ready but we want to also polish ourselves as well as what we are building from a holistic perspective uh building a product uh knowing what uh the you know uh what the marketing should be like how to build a community uh how to talk to investors we were very new and we are very rough at that point of time so bitcoin kernel actually made that happen for us uh we spoke to a lot of people there including vivek sachin uh luca thomas and like i probably am missing so many names but like you shout out to them and thanks for uh you know all the support uh they understood what our weaknesses were they helped us they worked with us uh we gave initially i think one hour long pitches and they really helped shape that up for us um and towards um you know the end of bitcoin girl yeah sorry i'm probably forgetting one part is that i wanted to give a shout out to simona here uh so one of the things that we wanted to do is uh understand what community what kind of marketing we should do and uh we we spoke to simon i think she gave one of the best pieces of advice and i still kind of you know use it every day when i'm working on things uh basically kind of when you're talking to your community when you're marketing whenever whatever you're doing with your project uh you know try to have your own original personality and just be genuine don't try to kind of force yourself into some a particular mold and that kind of really comes across so yeah i mean i'm really thankful to semora for that so just wanted to mention that um towards the end of bitcoin colonel uh we also were part of the bitcoin grants round seven and at that point of time we were a bootstrap project and i think a lot of you would probably correlate to that uh in this space that you know bootstrapping is tough you sort of have to find very creative ways to work around do your uh do the build do the marketing and so on but i think this was a point of time where we kind of had the like a very huge validation from the community um we were one of the top projects uh in our category and that actually meant that we not only had a grant but it also kind of validated the whole idea of what we are building so that was something really special because you realize that what you're building people actually like and they appreciate it and that's i think the time where i kind of fell in love with open source in general and uh probably uh at the same time i kind of promised myself that you know once we are in a position to sort of help somebody out uh we would also try to do that and yeah so we'll uh time would i hopefully in the future uh we're able to do that um around the same time uh we were talking to a lot of investors we were talking to a lot of web 3 leaders and they liked the idea they loved like the vision that we had um and that's when we also raised a seed round uh last year in december uh here i just want to you know share a short story that uh we were uh in the global hackathon our judge the first judge we had was mariano and he asked the first question to us uh and months later we got reconnected and uh he sent out an email with this video from ed global and a very sweet note and that was like wow like mariana continues just like he he wanted to help he believed in the vision and he was one of our early backers so yeah it's just a very humbling uh experience and a feeling and just super grateful to everybody uh you know who's back does badaji ken promethean foundation mariano scott preeti anthony defy dad and so many other people like there i think they are all the pictures are there on the website you can have a look at it over there uh and like lastly so we've done uh like we've had a lot of experiences we've met amazing people over here and um maybe just uh the parting thought that i have is uh maybe two or uh one day uh what this journey has taught us is that you know uh don't be afraid to sort of ask questions ask for help uh because people are really open the community is is always there to sort of help you there's never been a time when we've asked for help and people have sort of not been there so ask for help and the community will support you will help you and the second thing is that once you ha you get some kind of help and you're in a position to help somebody out help each other out and i think that's how we all can grow together and it's like a perfect win-win scenario and it comes like a full circle um yeah and this is just like a rewind of the entire story and um yeah the journey so far so i think i've spoken through most of it uh shout out to avi and matic for like the grants did help us a lot when we were completely bootstrapped and yep uh that's about it and you can um you know check us out at epns project on twitter and telegram and visit our website at epns.io so thanks for everybody and stay awesome was awesome rachel thank you so much we have a quick question from the audience who's asking what a push notification to a wallet looks like can you explain it to us uh so push notification to wallet looks like oh okay cool it's basically it's a notification as you would find it in web 2 uh and it would be push rather to a wallet address than maybe a centralized login like an email rather than an email so you can also download our uh app which is on the google play and ios and you can use adapt to basically see and look and feel how a notification from a decentralized world would look like very cool anything else you want to let the community know about how to find you and how to engage uh yeah sure just uh maybe follow us on epns project on twitter as well as epns project on telegram with super chatty and we'll be able to help with any questions that you have that's awesome thank you so much richard we appreciate you thanks shannon awesome to be here goodbye