Bankless - Devcon #9 - Push Protocol with Harsh Rajat

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Welcome to Devcon 6. The first Devcon for Bankless, the conference was a ton of fun and an amazing cultural experience in Bogota, Colombia. We’re speaking with Harsh Rajat about Push Protocol, the web3 communication network that enables cross-chain notifications and messaging for dapps, wallets, and services. ------ 📣 Push | Try the Communication Protocol of Web3 https://bankless.cc/Push ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  👾 SEQUENCE | ALL-IN-ONE PLATFORM https://bankless.cc/Sequence ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ------ Resources: Harsh: https://twitter.com/harshrajat  Push Protocol: https://twitter.com/pushprotocol  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, I got one last alpha leak for you, one last interview from DevConSix. That'll conclude the DevConSix experience. I hope you've enjoyed these interviews thus far. I hope it's made you feel like you were on the ground at DevConn's itself and you didn't miss a beat. There was so many more talks, so many more things to explore. They're all in the newsletter on Bankless about the DevConSix experience. This last one is about Push Protocol, which is also a sponsor of Bankless. So there's a disclaimer.

This is talking with the co-founder of Push, Harsh, who has been with Push since day one. And they've recently rebranded To Push from EPNS, Ethereum Push Notification Service, now just called Push, much better name. And if Push, of course, Pushes notifications to you about what's going on in Web 3, about what's going on in the Metaverse, into your phone, just like all your other notifications. And so there's probably a link in the show notes for you to get started if that intrigues you. But to learn more, just go ahead and listen to this conversation with Harsh from Push right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

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and DeSo's infinite state applications can finally store and index large amounts of content and data fully on-chain. With multiple crypto-native monetization mechanisms for both developers and creators, DeSot wants to usher in a new relationship with our social applications. Check them out at DeSo.com. And we are back at DefConS in Bogota. And now I'm speaking with Harsh from what was formerly called EPNS, but now called Push, which fits into my brain a lot better. Harsh, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks, sir. Thanks for having me. And now we have Push Protocol. EPNS was when we started during that coming in 2020, but now we are doing so much more. So it was better to call ourselves push. Besides that, some people pointed out, like, EPNS sounds a little different.

Someone, so push maybe better repract. And Push, of course, actually relates to the product that you are building. But for the bank listeners and the people out there that don't know what push is, give us the download. What's push? Got it. So push is basically the communication stack of VEPT. What we started building was push notifications for VAPT. So if you're just also, even when we are talking on WhatsApp, we are not really talking on WhatsApp as much as we are talking via notification on WhatsApp. And when we get them in the morning, we probably look at our phone. and we have all the notifications from email to banking alerts to PayPal and go on to any social thing we are doing to any gaming that we are doing and so on that was all Web2 like Web 2 is driven by notifications right but when you came to Web 3 this driven by notification was absent

there was no way for you to identify or for you to engage with a Web 3 wallet artist which is your username in Web 3 and that was the genesis of Bush which basically meant that It's a decentralized communication protocol using which any DAP, any smart contract, any backend. They can send communications including notifications and now chat as well, which are now directly tied to our wallet address. This is done through our open network like Ethereum, which made sure that any different wallet can just tap into a user wallet address and show them the communication out. It's multi-zane and its platform agnostic as well. And the things that it solves now is like, for example, DFI. So whenever you loan liquidates, before your loan can liquidate, now protocols can send alerts directly targeted to the wallet address

and say, hey, your loan might be liquidated, or on-chain governance or off-chain governance. So whenever the governance proposal comes, now people can be notified or the wallet address can be notified, so they can go out and vote. Metaverse, like it solves the problem. Communication, NFD, it's all. a problem of free targeting or even bidding, like if you're bidding for an employee who you want to negotiate.

So that was push notifications was all about and hence Ethereum push notification service. Because we now lost on and we are entering our Veptry journey, that Ethereum thing then means sense because we are revolving after Athenium to all the other errors and to even other non-ethyam claims as well. So we dropped the Ethereum part out. The service didn't make sense because this is a protocol like a block both push notification and the push chat that we launched. So we had to drop the service out. The push notification is not the only thing we are doing,

therefore we had to drop the notification out. Just make push and that's what we have. I love the story. I love the story. That's great. And just to re-articulate the thesis as to the model here is that most of the activity when we were looking at, in our devices are notifications.

Yes. But Ethereum doesn't have a way of communicating to us on our devices. This just doesn't really work. Yes. So the idea is like when your SMS text messages or Instagram, your emails all show up as a push notification, which is a Web 2 thing. Currently. And the idea here is that if we want all of these events on Ethereum, all the transaction

is an event. Anyways, all these events on Ethereum to look and behave the way that we're already used to our notifications looking and behave. we need them to show up next to our SNMS text messages or our Instagram messages or whatever. Exactly. So that's the idea. For us to get to one billion developers, the seamlessly of WebView or the UX of WebView needs to be put in Web3. So the three usenames are wallet apps?

Like Twitter username, WhatsApp username is a mobile phone. And they had notifications because they had that intrepidated. But for Web3 user names, which is a wallet address, this intro was not built it, and therefore push notifications made a lot of sense. There was, of course,

the higher underlying, like, once you build push notifications out, now you can build the next WhatsApp out or Discord out. So that's why we launched push chat as well during Defcom. The idea being now, when you're talking to a wallet,

you have notifications just like you have notifications for your WhatsApp or Twitter or Telegram. So now you can go back and talk to each other. So that's how we are trying to put a gap of UX for Web2 and Web3. Because what we feel is, like, communication is the sole way by which you can get adoption going. Of course, we are not only on a theme. We launched on Polygon as well, and we are going to launch on several other L2s as well.

Even the L2, that is the only serious blockchain. That's an inside job for optimism, by the way. Yeah. And then we are going to go beyond Ethereum as well, so we are going to launch on Let's Cisulana or Bitcoin that a web user can communicate seamlessly to any chain, to any protocol, or to any service. Using the wallet that they have, they don't have to move anywhere else.

And a big focus on many of the core Ethereum people, Vitalik mainly and many others like him, a focus on the non-financial use cases of blockchain, which we don't really have too much access to on the Ethereum layer one because of high gas fees. The only thing that you can really do in the era of high gas fees is financial stuff. Push fits into the financial stuff just to notify you of defy events. But I'm assuming that's a very small total overall market for what could be notifications on Ethereum. I think as we get to the layer two, it's super cheap gas fees.

And of course, here at DefCon, we've seen three announcements from the ZK roll-ups ecosystem about what test nets or on the layer two or layer three. So there's this era of low-fee things coming to Ethereum. And all of a sudden, I would expect that the surface area for notifications coming out of push would also be increasingly large. Is this something that you guys are thinking about ahead with all of these growth-in adoptions of very low-fee blockchains and all the potential notifications that we might need out of the result of this?

What are you thinking about this? Exactly. Exactly. So we just recently announced integration with Lens because, you know, social network is going to come on proxy. And social network cannot survive without documentation and without modifications. And that's the thing like that's how far we are thinking like metaverse. We are looking off metaverse. So we need to have a way by which wallets can come in late. They can chat.

They can give you call. They can do notifications. And that's what we are thinking. So you're exactly right. like even the transactions like when we used to send ourselves Ethereum we weren't able to be notified so we had to see the wallet and at times someone would have sent us something unfortunate times it would have someone would have had it would have gone but we never were notified of it so that was one basic utility that was all and then the apps and social

apps and the metaverse and then it came and of course all of the these they require notifications, all of these they require communication. So yeah, that's where we headed. The vision is Web3 media communication there, just like how Apple has the Web3 communication there. That's what pushes for that too. Yeah, I think you can totally just imagine defy events. They're not supposed to happen. You don't want a push notification by the defy event usually. Probably not. But when we get into the world of the Metaverse and like Web3 gaming, that's different kind of events. That's like social events. That's like cultural events. That's things that are happening in a game that you might be interested in. The landscape,

I'm sure, just opens up far broadly to all of these different use cases that we know we're on the horizon, just not here yet. And so I want to ask you, how does this change what a wallet is? Previously, people think a wallet is like where you can store all of your ether and your tokens and your NFTs. But now, with something like push, it changes it a little bit? Like, how does it change what a wallet is to use a game? Yes. So, for most of the whole, I mean for DFI also, like notifications are very important. Not when your loan is liquidated, that's just that. But before your loan is liquidated, now you can be notified.

So if you're working with the IDX, Harvey and a lot of further calls to ensure that notifications are sent before you are liquidated now. So DFI also plays a very huge product market fit. Coming back to wallets. So yeah, if you just think about it, like we don't have half apps. like in Web2. Like, for example, we log into Facebook, where we log into Twitter,

and they control all our data and they send us notifications and everything. Because there's a single username for each of it. But when you come to Web3, this is your shared username. You use the same wallet on UNISWAP, same wallet on lens,

and same wallet on anything that you do, even if you send the land or open sea. It's the same wallet. And therefore, this wallet now becomes your identity. Not crypto wallets, front end, but the wallet that you own, that becomes your identity. It becomes a username of sorts which has everything attached to it, like communication, your reputation, the way you have interacted in the past, all of it is actually attached to your wallet. And I think that's where we are headed,

identity, reputation, privacy, and communication. So I do think that's where we are going. Like, one very funny thing I did on Schelling Point, like, we were unhealing push. And that was inspired by optimism presentation. So I just went on CP3 and I just asked like, what are the next steps for blockchain or where blockchain is headed? And I'm legend telling you this. Like they said that the three main key points which they see in blockchain are Metaverse communication and machine learning and making sure that that machine learning can somehow

derive your identity, that you are real. without linking it to your real identity. So I'm glad that the AI thinks that we're solving one of the problems of the future. Sure, sure. So what actually is Push, though? Is it an app on your phone? Like, how does one interface with it? Got it. So Push is a protocol. In essence, it's a Lego building blog.

For other daps or other protocols or other smart contracts who want to notify their users. So just like how Apple, provided this notification platform and WhatsApp provided this chat blog platform, where other services can come and utilize it, which basically fills that gap for Web3. So if you're a protocol, you want to send notifications to your user, you use or you integrate push protocol into it. And then the user also has to sign up for, to receive the notifications, right?

Yes, yes. So the user signs or opt-in to receive notification from a protocol. that can be done from their front end or they can come to a discovery tab and just do an opt-in. It's a gasless process. So users, they don't have to pay any gas fee, whatever, again, the group model. So where do users actually go

get their notifications? Like, how does it show up on my phone? Got it. So because this is an open network, any crypto wallet can just go ahead and integrate it. So you are not an app. You are a service that any iOS app that's a wallet could hook into. Yes, we are

basically a protocol. We do provide our mobile app or Chrome extension that's built on our protocol but that can be done by any debt of wallet. We did announce our first integration with Polycon wallet so Polycon wallet will be

basically interfacing with push protocol and showing all those modifications out and we are talking to several other wallets because now I think we need to start the wallet integration journey. What are notifications to you getting from Russia? Oh yeah So my favorite one is actually from CoinDesk.

They also are non-spartners, so you get notifications of theirs. Then, EnS, like, I don't want to lose my E&S domain. So now whenever the domain expires, now there's a notification, which helps me a lot. It actually helped me because my E&S was expired. Then, yeah, after ENS, I do use something called gas tracker, But I think now the utility is going down for that channel because gases are kind of now optimize or not that high. So yeah, those three are my go-to channels. I usually just open to all the channels that I'm getting made.

Aguony Swap is also one of my favorite one because I do have an healthy pool. So whenever the feed falls out of frames, I'm getting notified. So that's also cool as well. Right, right. And just to impact that a little bit. V-3, you can have concentrated liquidity, and push can tell you when the price the Unoswool has gone in or out of that liquidity pool to tell you you're making money or you're not making money. Yes, yes. Actually, Uniswap tells because the app defines what notification they want to send.

But yeah, that's it. And so this is like a developer platform, so anyone can come and customize their own kind of push notifications, right? They can just build a notification service. Yes, yes. They can do it either directly from their smart contract or from back-end. What we are is a communication middleware. So we just enable whatever they want to send to wallets. We just validate and enable it to prove over.

Well, the thing that's come to mind is that we know that these Web 2 apps like compete for our attention with push notifications. And so now we've actually given our Web 3 apps that same competitive advantage for like, hey, pay attention to me. Like something's happening. Exactly. And so like now we can direct some of our attention from Web 2 and Web 3 a little bit more organically for better our risk to engage in the other

the attention to the economy. Exactly, exactly. So the way we do it, that's why we built the opt-in, because we don't want notification. Notifications are very useful, and they can be spammy as well. So that's why we said that a wallet address has to tap on opt-in before getting those notifications. Otherwise, it just lands on your spam box,

and the like the Twitter articles. Well, our congratulations from a Vibrand. I'm excited to see all of these notifications coming out into the world of what three. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.