Devcon #9 - Push Protocol with Harsh Rajat

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I've got one last Alpha League for you, one last interview from DevCon 6. That'll conclude the DevCon 6 experience. I hope you've enjoyed these interviews thus far. I hope it's made you feel like you were on the ground at DevCon 6 itself, and you didn't miss a beat. There were so many more talks, so many more things to explore. They're all in the newsletter on Bankless about the DevCon 6 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. 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

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  about what's going on in Web3, 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. TrueFi is leading DeFi into the future of on-chain, uncollateralized loans, opening up DeFi to the $8 trillion global credit market. Whether you want higher yields on your lending, or you're a fund manager who just wants access to global liquidity and the cost savings of DeFi, TrueFi is here for you. But if you're going to use TrueFi, use it through the Brave browser, the user-first browser for the Web3 age. Brave browser keeps your digital footprint small, keeping you in the driver's seat while also being a powerful battle station for Web3, letting you access your crypto

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  through its native wallet, view your NFTs, and keep up to date with your Web3 communities. Another thing you can use through Brave is, of course, Arbitrum. And you all, of course, have heard about Arbitrum, but the Arbitrum ecosystem is really heating up. With a recent launch of Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum has entered the world of multi-chain Layer 2s. And with a recent acquisition of Prismatic Labs, Arbitrum firepower is bigger than ever. Arbitrum Nitro shipped last month and has made Arbitrum faster and cheaper than ever before. But make sure that you can experience what Arbitrum has to offer before it's too late. But maybe you're a developer who hates the constraints of the EVM. So check out the Fuel VM from the Fuel Network, which has opened up the world of Parallel transaction execution, breaking Fuel network free from EVM baggage.

• 2:14David Hoffman?

  With Fuel, you can leverage the Rust tooling ecosystem to build stronger apps, all while keeping Ethereum-level security. Also pushing the frontier of Web3 development is the Sequence Wallet from Horizon. Sequence is the all-in-one developer platform you need to build Web3 games and applications. For users, Sequence is a smart wallet and perhaps the most intuitive wallet in all of Web3. But for developers, it's a plug-and-play platform for all Web3 apps and games. Check out Sequence, which is already powering some of the best Web3 games out there. And lastly, DSO is a decentralized social platform, built from the ground up to disrupt the social media industry. Disrupting social media takes a lot of data, and DSO's infinite state applications can finally store and index large amounts of content and data fully on-chain.

• 2:55David Hoffman?

  With multiple crypto-native monetization mechanisms for both developers and creators, DSO wants to usher in a new relationship with our social applications. Check them out at DSO.com. And now, on to the show. And we are back at DEFCON 6 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.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Thanks, everyone. Thanks for having me. And yeah, now we have Push to call. EPNS was when we started during 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 to someone.

• 3:38David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  So Push maybe better rebrand.

• 3:41David Hoffman?

  And Push, of course, actually relates to the product that you are building. But for the Bankless listeners and the people out there that don't know what Push is, give us the download. What's Push?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Got it. So Push is basically the communication stack of Web3. What we started building was first Push notifications for Web3. So if you just observe, 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 up in the morning, we probably look at our phone, and we have all the notifications from email, banking alerts to PayPal, then go on to any social thing. We are doing, when in gaming that we are doing and so on, that was all Web two, like Web two is driven by notifications, right? Uh, but when you, when you came to Web three, uh, this driven by notification was absent.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Uh, there was no way for you to identify, uh, or for you to communicate with a Web three wallet address, which is your username in Web three. And that was the genesis of Push, uh, which basically meant that it's a decentralized communication protocol using both any app, any smart contract, any backend, they can send communications, including notifications and now chat as well, which are now directly tied to a wallet address. Uh, this is done through an open network like Ethereum, uh, which makes sure that any type of wallet can just tap into a user wallet address and can show them the communication now. Uh, it's multi-chain and it's platform agnostic as well.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And the things that it solves now is like, for example, DeFi. 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. Uh, 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 of communication and F T, it solves the problem of re-targeting or even bidding. Like if you are bidding for an L G, or you want to negotiate. So that was Push, notifications was all about and hence Ethereum Push Notification Service.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  But because we, uh, we now launched on Polygon and we are entering our Web three journey, that Ethereum thing then makes sense because we are involved with, uh, after Ethereum to all the other L Gs and to even other non-Atheneum things as well. So we dropped the Ethereum part out, then, uh, the service then makes sense because this is a protocol like block with push notification and the push chat that we launched. So we had to drop the service out, that push notification is not the only thing we are doing. Uh, therefore we had to drop the notification out. It was just to make push and that's what we have.

• 6:36David Hoffman?

  I love the story. I love the story. That's great. And just to re-articulate the thesis as to the, the, the model here is that. Most of the activity when we're looking at our devices are notifications.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  But Ethereum doesn't have a way of communicating to us on our devices. This just doesn't really work.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:52David Hoffman?

  And so the idea is like, your SMS text messages, your Instagram, your emails all show up as a push notification.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  Which is a web two thing currently. And the idea here is that if we want all of these events on Ethereum, all of the transaction is, is an event anyways. All these events on Ethereum to look and behave the way that they, that we're already used to our notifications looking and behaving. We need them to show up next to our SMS text messages or our Instagram messages or whatever.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So that's, that's the idea. Like, for us to get to one billion developers, the seamlessness of Web two or the UX of Web two needs to be put in Web three. So Web three usernames are wallet address, like Twitter username, I U Twitter username, WhatsApp username is a mobile phone. And they had notifications because, you know, they had that entrapped in it. But for Web three usernames, which are wallet address, this entrant was not built in. And therefore push notifications wait a lot of seconds. There was, of course, a 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 DevCon. The idea being now, when you're talking to a wallet,

• 8:06Speaker 01

  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 bridge the gap of UX for Web two and Web three. 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 Ethereum. Like, we launched on Pokemon as well and we are going to launch on several other L2s as well. Even the L2 that is only serious blockchain.

• 8:40David Hoffman?

  That's an inside joke for optimism, by the way.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we are going to go beyond Ethereum as well. So we are going to launch on, let's say Solana or Bitcoin, right? I mean, that a Web3 user can communicate seamlessly through any chain, through any protocol, or through any service.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Using the wallet that they have, they don't have to move anywhere else.

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  And a big focus on many of the core Ethereum people, Vitalik mainly and many others like him, are focused on the non-financial use cases of blockchain, which we don't really have too much access to on the Ethereum Layer 1 because of high gas fees. The only thing that you can really do in an era of high gas fees is financial stuff. But Push fits into the financial stuff just to notify you of DeFi events. But I'm assuming that's a very small total overall market for what could be notifications on Ethereum. And I think as we get to the Layer 2, it's with super cheap gas fees. And of course, here at DEFCON, we've seen three announcements from the ZK rollups ecosystem about what test nets or on the Layer 2 or Layer 3.

• 9:51David Hoffman?

  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 and adoptions of very low-fee blockchains and all the eventual notifications that we might need out of result of this? What are you thinking about this?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yes, so exactly. So we just recently announced our integration with Lens, because, you know, social network is going to come on proxy. And social network cannot survive without communication and without notifications. And that's the thing, like, that's how far we are thinking, like Metaverse, we are talking more Metaverse. So we need to have a way by which wallets get them made, they can chat, they can video call, they can do notifications, and that's what we are thinking. So you're exactly right, 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.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Unfortunate times, it would have, someone would have had them, would have gone. But we never were notified of it. So that, that, that was one basic utility that got solved. And then the apps and the social apps and the metaverse and then NFT came, it came. And of course, all of these, they require notifications, all of these, they require communication. So yeah, that's, that's where we're headed. Like the vision is Web3 made of communication there. Uh, just like how Apple has the Web2 communication there, that's what push is for that too.

• 11:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think you can totally just imagine DeFi events, they're not supposed to happen. You don't want a push notification about a DeFi event, usually, probably not. Um, 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, uh, far broadly to all of these different use cases that we know are on the horizon, just aren't here yet. Uh, and so I want to ask you, how does this change what a wallet is? Uh, previously, people think a wallet is like where you 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 a user?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yes, so first of all, I mean for DeFi also, like notifications are very important. Uh, not when your loan is liquidated, that's just sad. But before your loan is liquidated, now you can be notified. So we're working with BIDX, uh, Harvey and a lot of other, uh, costs to ensure that notifications are sent before you are liquidated now. So DeFi also plays a very huge, huge product market fit. Uh, coming back to wallets, so yeah, if you just think about it, like, we don't have apps like in Web2. So, uh, like for example, we log into Facebook, but we log into Twitter and they control all our data and they send us notifications and everything.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Because there's a single username for each of them. 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 Decentraland or OpenSea, it's the same wallet. And therefore, this wallet now becomes your identity. Uh not crypto wallets fronted, but the wallet that you own that becomes your identity. It becomes a way, it becomes a username of sorts. Which has everything attached to it, like communication, uh your reputation, uh. The way you have interacted in the past, all of it is actually attached to your wallet.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And I think that's where we are headed, uh identity, reputation, privacy and communication. So I I don't think that's that's where we are going. Like one very funny thing I did on Shelling Point, like we were on getting push chat. Uh and that was inspired by optimism presentation. So I just went on C P T three and I just asked like what are the next steps for uh blockchain? Or where blockchain is headed? So uh and I let I'm legit telling you this, like they said. That the three main key points which they see in blockchain are meta voice, uh communication. And uh even machine learning and uh making sure that that machine learning can somehow uh derive your identity.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  That you are real, uh without linking it to your real identity. So I'm glad that the the A I thinks that we're solving one of the problems of the future.

• 14:38David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure. And so what what actually is Push though? Is it an app on your phone? Like, how how does one interface with it?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Got it. So Push is a protocol. Uh in essence, it's a Lego building block.

• 14:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  For other apps or other protocols or other smart contracts who want to notify their users.

• 14:57David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  So just like how Apple provided this modification platform and WhatsApp provided this chat block platform. Uh where and other services can come and replies it. Push basically fills that gap for the tree. So if you're the protocol, you want to send notifications to your user, you use or you integrate Push Protocol into it.

• 15:17David Hoffman?

  And then the user also has to like sign up for to receive the notifications, right?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So the user signs or opts in to see notifications from a protocol. That can be done from their front end, or they can come to our discovery app and just do a opt-in. It's a gasless process. So users, they don't have to pay any gas fee, whatever, again, with the protocol.

• 15:42David Hoffman?

  So where do users actually go get their notifications? Like, how does it show up on my phone?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Got it. So because this is an open network, any crypto wallet can just go ahead and integrate it.

• 15:52David Hoffman?

  So you are not an app, you are a service that any iOS app that's a wallet could hook into?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yes, we are basically a protocol. We do provide like our mobile app or Chrome extension that's built on our protocol. But that can be done by any crypto wallet. We did announce our first integration with Polygon Wallet. So Polygon Wallet will be basically interfacing with Push Protocol and showing all those notifications out. And we are talking to several other wallets, because now I think we need to start that with the wallet integration journey.

• 16:27David Hoffman?

  Sure. What notifications do you get sometimes?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So my favorite one is actually from CoinDesk. We are also our launch partners, so we get notifications of theirs. Then ENS, like I don't want to lose my ENS domain. So now whenever the domain expires, now there's a notification which now helps me a lot. It actually helped me because my ENS was expired. Then, 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 optimized or not that high.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  So yeah, those three are my go-to channels. I usually just opt onto all the channels that I'm getting made. Uniswap is also one of my favorite ones, because I do have a healthy pool. So whenever the fee falls out of phase, I'm getting notified. So that's also cool as well.

• 17:34David Hoffman?

  Right, right. And just to unpack that a little bit, Uniswap V3, you can have concentrated liquidity, and Push can tell you when the price, the Uniswap pool has gone in or out of that liquidity pool to tell you you're making money or you're not making money.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Actually, Uniswap does because the app defines what notification they want to send. But yeah, that's all.

• 17:54David Hoffman?

  And so this is like a developer platform, so anyone can come and customize their own kind of uh, uh, Push notifications, right? They can just now create, build a, build a, build a notification service.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. They can do it either directly from their smart contract or from backend. Like, uh, what, what we are is a communication variable. So we just enable whatever they want to send to wallets. We just validate and enable it to prove over.

• 18:20David Hoffman?

  Well, the, the thing that's come to mind is that, uh, 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, that same competitive advantage of like, "Hey, pay attention to me. Like, something's happening." Exactly. And so like now we can direct our attention from Web 2 to Web 3 a little bit more, uh, organically for better or worse to engage into the attention economy.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So the way we do it, like, that's why we built the Ogden. 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 have on Ogden uh, before getting those notifications. Otherwise, it just lands on your spam box and like the Twitter.

• 19:05David Hoffman?

  Well, our congratulations on the brand. I'm excited to see all of these notifications coming out into the world of Web 3.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 19:11David Hoffman?

  Thanks, Stan. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.