What is Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) ?

EPNS comes into play when the web3 components like dApps and smart contracts fail to provide a genuine and organic communication medium with their users, which is then filled by alternative communication mediums like Twitter, telegram or email, defeating the purpose of web 3.0. Push (previously EPNS) Protocol is a web3 communication network, enabling cross-chain notifications and messaging for dApps, wallets, and services. It enables wallet addresses to receive notifications in a platform agnostic fashion from both decentralized and centralized carriers.

So what does EPNS mean in simple terms?

When we pick up our phone in the morning, we are informed of all the important things we need to tend to through notifications, but that is missing in web3. In web3 we have to constantly verify actions that are irreversible,manually. By using EPNS you can get notifications about your bids and orders from the Decentraland Marketplace along with news and updates from different web3 platforms.

Why EPNS is a missing part of WEB3?

Imagine not being informed about a stock price going up or Elon Musk tweeting, immediately . No one wants to miss such opportunities.

When the governance proposals are up and running we might miss them and they expire. When the price of our favourite tokens goes up or down we have no clue till we login to check .

This leads to FOMO and we can’t help but keep drugging ourselves into the loop of constantly working, checking and verifying manually for updates which is tiresome.

EPNS helps us by automating notifications, which alerts us about different topics from different platforms as well as about our online transactions.

With the help of EPNS we can choose the notifications we receive and get incentivized for receiving them too, so we never miss out on opportunities and get rewarded down the line.

ELEMENTS of EPNS

• User — You are a user if your wallet is involved in the protocol. You can also become a channel by activating yourself as a channel or can become a subscriber by subscribing to one or more channels and receiving token incentives.
• Channels-If you activate yourself on the protocol to send notifications you will be called a Channel. Channel stakes fees in a stake pool and the token incentives accumulated are distributed among their subscribers in a weighted proportion.
• Subscribers-When you subscribe to one or more channels, you will be called a subscriber. A channel can also be a subscriber of other channels.

Advantages of EPNS

• EPNS is a permisionless less protocol so any crypto wallet or another protocol can integrate with EPNS to send out notifications
• Notifications are sent in a gasless way.
• They are FREE for subscribers.
• Notification can be in different forms of content (images, call to action, videos, etc.)
• Even encrypted notifications can be sent out.
• EPNS can be used both through their extension and app
• It can be used across different blockchains.
• Notifications are sent to verify or update transactions from your wallet.
• Users will receive incentives for receiving notifications.
• Alerts will be only sent if you subscribe to the notification channel.
• Spam rate is from 0–1. If it exceeds 0.8, the number of notifications starts getting limited for a channel. So no bombarding like in the case of Web2.

Conclusion :

EPNS is the basic concept of notifications that you get spammed by in your day-to-day life . But this has been made more novel in web3 by providing the subscribing feature to notifications. Not just that, you also get incentivized for being a subscriber in the protocol. EPNS is a really helpful tool in the online world of web3 where we conduct irreversible transactions, which should be checked and verified as many times as possible. The protocol is still evolving along with the web3 space. For more detailed info go to their website push.org