Ethereum Push Notification Service a.k.a EPNS is a notification service on WEB3, which allow services to send notification to users (wallet addresses). Not that annoying spam notifications sent by your social media apps but notifications from Blockchain services about status of your assets and other important things.
Do you check the price of coins every minute? Are you using dApps to lend or borrow assets? Are you worried about liquidation? Do you check the status every now and then? Well, you can sit back and relax now. This is made possible by a project on Ethereum chain, called EPNS.
EPNS is a decentralized notification protocol built on Ethereum. It is founded by Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi. You can read the whitepaper here. With EPNS, you don’t have to worry about getting hundreds of annoying notifications every hour. Not all services won’t be able to send notifications to you. Only services that you opt in (subscribe) can send you alerts. It’s totally up to you to decide who should send you a notification and who shouldn’t.
EPNS is also dApp friendly. Just a like a user can decide which services to receive notifications from, services can also chose which users should be able to subscribe to them. There are 3 types of channels, one is open to any one. Means any one can subscribe to notifications from them, second one is closed and users need an invitation from the service to subscribe to notifications. The third one allow any user to request to subscribe and the service need to approve them in order for the user to start getting notifications. This way, EPNS is ensuring it is both user friendly and dApp friendly.
There are many popular services currently using EPNS to deliver notifications to their users. This includes Uniswap, AAVE, ENS, etc. ENS use EPNS to notify you when your domain is about to expire. AAVE use EPNS to notify when your loan health score goes low and Uni use EPNS to send notifications when new proposals are up for voting so the token holders can vote on them. Alpha Homora use EPNS to notify you before liquidation. BTC and ETH price trackers are also available which update you about the price every 6 hours so that you can stop checking prices.
EPNS offers wide range of products, including EPNS mobile app which allows you to receive notifications on your iOS/ Android device. EPNS dApp allows you to receive push notifications in your browser, EPNS infra allows to carry notification from a decentralized environment to centralized environment.
Scams are very common in blockchain and once you fell victim, there’s nothing you can do. The only way to stay safe is by not falling victim to scams. EPNS effectively handling scam/ spam by assigning a spam score to services. The spam score of 0 of a service means you can trust it and it’s completely safe while spam score 1 means the channel is not that good.
From channel’s perspective, sending notification is not a big deal. There are JS libraries available and the notification is send in JSON format, which is widely used among developers.
Governance
PUSH is the governance token of EPNS project. The token have a total supply of 100 Million and the current circulating supply is only 13.3 Million. PUSH token holders can participate in EPNS governance by voting on proposals directly or delegating it to a EPNS delegatee (who have a minimum of 75K PUSH delegated to them).
Rewards
A service need to stake 50 DAI (A stable coin) if they want to activate a notification channel. This DAI will, then be added to a staking pool which used to incentivize users and app developers. When a service deactivate their channel, 30 DAI will be sent back, 10 will be kept in the pool and 10 will be sent to fee pool. This ensure unwanted services are not activating a channel for spamming.
Users who subscribe to a service will get a share of rewards from the staking pool, generated by the DAI staked by the service. Wallet developers who integrate EPNS to their project will also get rewards for integrating with developers as an initiative to support them and bring more developers to EPNS.
Apps
EPNS dApp is currently in testing phase and you can visit it at https://app.epns.io/ and connect via a wallet. You need to be in Ropsten network to interact with EPNS since it is in testing phase.
EPNS have mobile application, in which you can enter your wallet address or scan QR code to add your wallet.
In order to start receiving notifications, you need to subscribe to a service, sign a message from EPNS in your wallet and then broadcast a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain. EPNS is totally free and the entire process will only cost you a small network gas fee, which is required to execute a smart contract call.
You can find some links below
Telegram: https://t.me/epnsproject
Website: https://epns.io/
Whitepaper: https://epns.io/LitepaperEthereumPushNotificationService.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/epnsproject
