Push Protocol (PUSH)

Push Protocol

Type	Push Notifications
Total supply	100,000,000
Website	EPNS.io

From this article (8-9-2020):

"A decentralized push notification protocol built on top of the Ethereum chain. EPNS aims to provide a standard, transparent and efficient communication channel to be established between Web3 services and its users.

Basics

• Based in: Singapore (12-2020), but the team is from India
• Fka EPNS (9-2022)
• Founded in: early 2020
• Mainnet release: Q3 / Q4 2021 scheduled (12-5-2021). Went live on 11-1-2022.

• From CMC (8-5-2021):

"The Ethereum Push Notification Service or EPNS is a notification protocol that can enable the wallet addresses of the users to receive notifications. This means that, through the usage of this protocol, any DApp or smart contract, as well as service, can send notifications through to users in a platform-agnostic way. EPNS also contains a DeFi aspect that enables users to earn crypto for receiving the actual notifications. EPNSoriginally launched as an idea in January of 2020."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Governance

DAO

• From their blog (10-9-2021):

"Today, EPNS is launching our governance framework along a roadmap of Progressive Decentralized Governance. Governance launches on September 16, and nominations for PUSH Delegatees are open!

EPNS Governance will launch with three ways for the community to vote and be involved: 1) Grants Program, 2) Weekly Rockstar NFT, and 3) Metagovernance.

There are 4 roles within EPNS Governance:

1. PUSH Nominee: community members who can be delegated $PUSH to vote on proposals.
2. PUSH Delegatee: nominees who have 75,000+ $PUSH delegated, and can create new proposals.
3. PUSH Delegator: $PUSH token holders who can vote and/or delegate tokens.
4. PUSH Champions: individuals from across the ecosystem who help champion the EPNS governance framework and keep the community updated.

Implementing EPNS Governance marks the protocol’s next milestone, as we gradually move towards complete decentralization of the decision-making process. In this first iteration of the governance mechanism, we will use Snapshot, which is an off-chain and gasless multi-governance client. Due to its Snapshot-based implementation, the voting mechanism shall be weighted based on the number of $PUSH tokens delegated to the voting address. Hereafter, any potential modifications to the protocol must pass through a proposal and voting process."

Treasury

• 30%​ of Fees Pool forms Ecosystem development pool (12-2020).

Token

Launch

• Had a Polkastarter IDO.

Token allocation

• From IcoDrops (8-5-2021):

1. Community 53%
2. Investors 20.5%
3. Team 16%
4. Foundation 7%
5. Advisors 3.5%

• From Morioh (4-2021):

"2.58% of the total supply is allocated for public listings during token genesis.

We also want to take this opportunity to say thank you to the wonderful community of early adopters and grantors who helped get us here today. To properly show our gratitude, we will be airdropping $PUSH to the following addresses:

1.55% of the total supply is reserved for gratitude allocations at the time of token genesis.

• 1.03% will be distributed to over 900 early users of the EPNS beta product (snapshot taken on March 20, 2021).
• 0.28% will be distributed to those who donated during Gitcoin Grants rounds 6 and 7; over 200 addresses.
• 0.24% is reserved for distribution through a community NFT activation immediately following token genesis. Stay tuned for more on this soon!

5.51% of the total $PUSH supply is reserved for LP Rewards and Staking.

1. For the 3.01% reserved for LP rewards, 35,000 will be unlocked every week, with 100 fewer $PUSH released every week (i.e. 34,900 released during week 2). This will continue for 100 weeks.
2. For the 2.51% reserved for staking, 30,000 will be unlocked every week, with 100 fewer $PUSH released every week (i.e. 29,900 released during week 2). This will continue for 100 weeks."

Utility

• Governance and reward token.

• From Morioh (4-2021):

"$PUSH is the native governance token for the EPNS protocol. $PUSH grants its owners voting rights over core functionalities of the protocol, in addition to revenue accrued as network fees.For notifications sent through the protocol, micro-fees are gathered from the service providers. Fees are distributed in a ratio of 70% for $PUSH holders and 30% for the ecosystem development pool. $PUSH governance can vote on fee structures and more."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Built on: Ethereum, IPFS and Aave (12-10-2020). Push Protocol expanded to include Polygon and BNB Chain (4-2023).

How it works

• From this article (8-9-2020):

"Using EPNS Channels, channel owners can send notifications to their subscribers; this feature could be used to help developers create a focal point during critical governance voting processes. Establishing such a decentralized yet efficient connection with the user base not only empowers the Web3.0 space, but also helps in better governance for the chains themselves by keeping their users up to date in community and chain-related matters, and potentially reduce voter apathy."

• From their FAQ (7-5-2021):

"The EPNS solution is comprised of 4 components: Service, Channel, Subscriber, User.

1. Service: A service is any user, wallet owner, dapp, or Web3 services that would like to send notifications. Essentially, a service is any addressable user of EPNS.
2. Channel: A channel is any service that has activated itself on the EPNS protocol and can therefore begin creating notifications.
3. User: Any participant in Web3 that wishes to receive notifications about a dapp, wallet, or smart contract.
4. Subscriber: A user that has elected to receive notifications from any particular channel (i.e. someone who subscribes to a channel that sends out a specific notification)."

• From CMC (8-5-2021):

"For Web 3.0, a notification mechanism that can notify users or wallet addresses of important updates, events, actions and so on, does not exist yet. As a result of this lack, a lot of important events or required user actions end up being missed completely: for example, the expiration of ENS blockchain domains is inefficiently broadcast on Twitter, with the hopes that the grace domain user potentially reads about their domain’s expiry. If a protocol gets compromised, people have to look for other methods (besides the now-compromised protocol) through which they can notify the users. EPNS tries to solve this with its push notification service.

To do this efficiently, the notification is stored and treated like a JSON payload, and this is transformed as per the rules of the different carriers when the notification ends up reaching them. The JSON payload can differ with payload types, and this ensures the flexibility of the content, as well as the data, storage interpretation and delivery.

What this means is that EPNS can allow users to be in direct, full control of what services they end up getting notifications from, and impose rules on the services, which includes spam protection for users, and limits for EPNS ability to add wallets as subscribers. This means that notifications are treated as a social feed rather than a piece of information.

The Ethereum Push Notification Service Network will use Eth-Crypto to handle the secure verification process. This is a cryptographic JavaScript-function enabler for Ethereum."

• From DeFi Dad, their advisor (12-5-2021):

"EPNS requires its users to opt into “channels” with an Ethereum wallet address. Once you opt in, the channel owner (ie DeFi protocols) can alert you about a variety of things including:

1. Exploits and hacks
2. Liquidation warnings (ie on Aave or Compound)
3. Loan expiry dates
4. New product announcements
5. Crucial governance votes
6. Instructions for token migrations
7. New yield farming programs and end dates"

Staking

• From their blog (14-9-2020):

"AAVE is a critical component of EPNS Game Theory, incentivizing users along with delivering notifications. When a Channel (services — dapps, SCs) stake on the EPNS protocol, the stake goes to a combined stake pool of Channels and starts earning interest using AAVE. This interest is then distributed to all the subscribers (wallet addresses) of that service in a weighted manner preferring the earliest subscriber more than the later ones. Refer to the EPNS Whitepaper."

Liquidity Mining

• From DeFi Dad, their advisor (12-5-2021):

"To distribute the governance token PUSH, EPNS offers liquidity mining rewards currently at a rate of 131% APR for staking PUSH or 221% APR for providing liquidity to the PUSH / ETH LP in Uniswap v2. All liquidity mining rewards are issued in weekly epochs which complete every Wednesday at 8:30 am UTC. One must remain in either staking pool until the epoch completes or else they forfeit their accrued PUSH rewards."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

Projects that use or built on it

• Alpha Homora; (14-4-2021). Alpha Homora V2 integration with EPNS is now live (16-7-2021).
• Biconomy; (16-4-2021).
• bZx; (4-5-2021).
• Ceramic; (6-5-2021).
• Gitcoin; (30-4-2021).
• Gnosis Safe; (16-3-2021).
• Frontier; (28-4-2021).
• Polygon; (27-4-2021).
• PoolTogether; (7-5-2021).
• Superfluid; (24-3-2021).
• Uniswap; ((30-3-2021).
• Unstoppable Domains; (6-4-2021).
• Yam (26-5-2021).

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Took funding from MoonWhale which according to ZachXBT mainly funds cash grabs and straight up scams (10-12-2021). Although this not directly means that this project is then also scammy, it does mean that the founders did not vest their VCs well.

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found here.
• Harsh Rajat; founder / project lead
• Richa Joshi; co-founder
• DeFi Dad; advisor
• Vivek Singh; advisor

Funding

• Raised $10.1M USD at a valuation of $131M in their Series A (14-4-2022).
• Won a grant from Matic (13-9-2020). And one from Aave (14-9-2021).
• According to their website they are backed by (7-5-2021):

True Ventures, Binance Labs, IOSG Ventures, The LAO, MetaCartel, LD Capital, BR Capital, MoonWhale, Bitscale, Bixin Ventures, Fourth Revolution Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, Kenneth NG, Mariano Conti, Scott Moore, Sandeep Naiwal, DeFi Dad, Anthony Sassano and Preethi Kasireddy.

• They got $1.41M from their sale (29-3-2021).