Mumbai-based Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) has raised $750,000 seed investment from prolific angel investors and HNIs.
The blockchain startup sends a decentralised DeFi notification protocol (smart contract), which any dApps or services can use to send notifications to the wallet addresses of Ethereum.
The round saw investment from angels like Balaji Srinivasan (Former CTO of Coinbase, General Partner at a16z. Cofounder of Earn, Counsyl, Teleport); Kenneth Ng (Ethereum Foundation); Scott Moore (Co-founder, Gitcoin); Mariano Conti (Fmr Head of Smart Contracts, MakerDAO); Anthony Sassano (EthHub / TheDailyGwei); DeFiDad (COO, Zapper.fi); Ravindra Kumar (Frontier Wallet); Preethi Kasireddy (Former Partner at a16z); Andrew Chen (Prescient Capital); Rezo & Evgeny Zandman (BR Capital); Luka Sucic, Ben Lakeoff, Auryn Macmillan (Gnosis); Danny Christ (Moonwhale); Ganeshram Gunalan, Thomas Kaseng Ao and Kathik Garg (Bridge Capital LLC).
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Speaking of the funding, Harsh Rajat, Co-founder, EPNS, said,
“Notifications are a basic necessity for dApps and smart contracts, and should not be an option for a popular smart contract, but a communication layer that should be accessible to everyone. This is the crucial missing piece of web3 infrastructure that will enable adoption. Innovation drives enthusiasts but adoption needs user ease and engagement.”
The platform allows services to send notifications to the wallets. But apart from notifications, users also earn from receiving the notifications. Since the encrypted data of these notifications is stored on the blockchain (directly or indirectly), it not only enables the team to send push notifications to mobile phones or tablets, but essentially to any centralised or decentralised carriers.
Richa Joshi, Co-founder, EPNS, added, “While blockchain keeps on delivering innovations and taking leaps in technology, it still is unable to notify a user when their loan is liquidated, or a NFT is available, or a DAO governance proposal is put up, or a gaming auction happens or even when your blockchain domain expires.”
EPNS aims to become the web3 standard for notifications and even awards crypto to users, who have to opt-in to enable receiving notifications from the services they are interested in.
It also enables splitting the fees generated among all crypto wallets/infrastructure that builds on top of it using decentralised governance and claims to have partially solved the monetisation issue plaguing the wallets, without sacrificing the service interest or users centric approach of the protocol.