Push Notifications for Crypto with Harsh Rajat from EPNS

HOST:  Hey everybody.  Welcome back to the Unstoppable Podcast.  I’m your host, Diana Chen, and I’m here today with our guest, Harsh Rajat.  He’s the founder at EPNS, Ethereum Push Notification Service, which is the world’s first decentralized push notification protocol.  

Also, really quick a special announcement, we recently partnered with EPNS to integrate our dot crypto domain names with their push notification service.  So you can now receive notifications from any decentralized application or smart contract to your wallet using your, your name .crypto domain name.  Very exciting stuff, and welcome, Harsh.  Thanks so much for being here.

HARSH RAJAT:  Thanks, thanks for having me, Diana, and I’m just really, really happy about our partnership, so woo-hoo.

HOST:  I am as well yeah, we just launched—kicked off today and I’m really excited to see where everything goes.  Before we dive deeper into EPNS.  I want to know a little bit about your background and how you got into crypto.  So take me all the way back to when you first heard about crypto, and when you first got interested in it.  When was that, and how did you get interested in it?

HARSH RAJAT:  Got it, got it.  So long story coming, by the way.  So yeah, so before crypto, I was a mobile app entrepreneur, I used to create mobile apps and games.  So got, got at the right place at the right time.  That was 2010, Apple just launched iOS Version 3, if I remember it right, and we just started creating apps and games.  So luckily, the first app which we created, it was called 360 Web Browser, it went on to become the top 10 in the US App Store in its own category, and yeah, that was the start of the journey.  

It did really, really well, and of course, with any technology or any app that does well at that point of time.  You’re looking at all the new tech that is coming out and you have to push out all the features to the user.  So yeah, that was when Apple also launched a push notification service, Apple Push Notification Service in short and if you would have already guessed it, you know, that thing basically tied up to a Ethereum Push Notification Service.

But yeah moving forward, four years down the line 2014, ‘15.  I was kind of getting bored with this programming on apps and games.  So at that point of time, I started exploring various tech—I love to dabble in everything tech so around that time, I started dabbling in AI, machine learning.  I started even creating some vital content websites and back then so whatever was popular at that point of time I was doing.

Around that point of time of course, Bitcoin reached $1,000, and was in the news.  So of course that got me excited.  So I started trading, I followed the classic concept which was buy high sell low.  So yeah, didn’t really own a lot of profit from it, but yeah, thankfully, that was my entrance to crypto, very quickly I realized that this is a very new space, very bleeding edge, and I also realized that you know, whenever some new tokens or coins were launching, there was a battle which was like, if they are launching on Tier 3 exchanges.  Then whenever they go to Tier 2 or Tier 1 exchanges, of course, there is a demand or a value hike.  So you know, I realized that quickly created a broad—board.  The board basically decided which exchange is popular, which is not based on the old data, and then it kind of arbitraged and created any coins that were launching on tier one exchanges, and if they were available on tier three, it was listening to you know, Twitter, Binance fees, and you know, crawling all over the web to do that.  

So yeah, that point of time, I think not a lot of people were doing that.  So it performed really well, and in in 2016, ‘17 it started picking up a lot of ERC-20 coins.  So of course that spiked my interest, and then I started checking Ethereum out, and it was at that point of time I realized that you can program on Ethereum; till that point of time I was like Bitcoin maximalist.  But yeah, at that point of time, of course, I realized that now we have programmable money, and of course, I wanted to dive in to see and understand what we can do with it, so that was 2018.  

Of course, because I had earlier experience—I had experience in the field of mobile, that you cannot dive into something and expect to be a know all.  So you have to gather experience around it.  So in 2018, I joined a company.  They were doing P2P meta transactions and exploding identity.  Was there for one and a half years and then until later part of 2020, I decided that, you know, I should get into, or I should explore decentralized entrepreneur journey, but—I should explore decentralized entrepreneur journey when it’s the right time, because what’s the point of doing that when all the missing pieces have been solved?  

So yeah, that was 2020, and around that point of time, I sat down, I went through a lot of dApps, a lot of smart contracts, and I was trying to contrast that experience with a lot of services which we use, like Gmail, or PayPal, or Venmo, or Amazon, or whatever fit—whatever fitted that kind of category.  And very quickly, I realized that there’s a huge gap in communication when it comes to Ethereum or when it comes to any smart contracts or any dApps.  

So yeah, if you think about that, whatever we do in Web 2.0, whether it’s receiving mails, whether it’s Venmo payments, whether it’s our Amazon parcel delivery, whether it’s our social status, or even our WhatsApp chats, or messages, or FaceTime calls, everything comes in the form of notification, or in other way the service basically sends—the service basically sends a communication to the user, that hey, this is something which might be important for you, and come check it out in case you want to, and you know, when you look Web 3.0, surprisingly this is absent because there’s no communication layer on blockchain.  And because of that, a lot of problems happen.  So you know, if you’re talking about DeFi, loan liquidations happen.  When was the last time you have heard that you were sleeping and the bank came and took your house?  That doesn’t happen in Web 2.0, but yeah in Web 3.0, you’ve been asleep and your loan liquidation cannot go, and you cannot really do anything about it because you don’t get to know about it.  Then you think about governance proposals.  A lot of governance proposals are missed, because the users they don’t come to know about it.  Even domain names, whenever they are near expiry, notification should be sent out to that wallet address.  Because you know that that is how the Web 3.0 should be.  And yeah, even NFT auctions, or security audits, or the security bugs or the—anything in between, they require communication.  

So yeah, that was the idea, and that was the genesis of Ethereum Push Notification Service.

HOST:  Amazing.  I definitely want to dive deeper into some of the use cases so that our listeners can really understand just how useful of a service EPNS really is.  But just to back up a little bit.  What would be your best advice for people listening who are maybe developers, or engineers, or come from a tech background, but brand new to the blockchain space?  What’s your best advice for them for how they can learn more about blockchain?

HARSH RAJAT:  Got it.  So the best thing to do is join a Hackathon.  Actually, the best thing to do is try to Ethereum Foundation.  They basically will guide you in the right direction, but yeah, most of the time they will say join a Hackathon and just go and build your stuff there.  There are a lot of things that happen in the Hackathon.  One of the things—one of the things which a Hackathon does to early developers is it gives them access to a lot of mentors.  A lot of people who have built a lot of top projects in the entire ecosystem, they are there, and now you have access to them.  They can also guide you on, on certain different things, which a project usually needs.  

So if you think about it, you have a project or even if you want to explore blockchain, Hackathon is the best way forward, because they have people who know how to guide you, especially in the early stage, and they’re also people who have a few leaders over there.  So they can tell you about your idea, how to build about it with a long term vision in mind.

HOST:  Love it.  And then what do you see as some of the major issues right now that’s preventing mass adoption of blockchain technology, even we have very talented developers and technologists out there who haven’t gotten into the space yet.  What do you think are some of the roadblocks that are preventing people from getting into the space?

HARSH RAJAT:  Sure.  So I mean, when you’re thinking about roadblocks, I see more like, I see a pattern over here.  So I see this to be like, the early days of internet.  A lot of people came in—-a lot of people were shy when early internet came in.  And it was for good reasons.  I mean, there were a lot of things that needed to be solved.  One of the things was the amount of noise that definitely needed to go away, but yeah, lot of things.  I mean, the only problem with blockchain at this point is that there’s still a lot of things that needs to be solved.  Still a lot of problems that needs to be figured out, and sometimes, you know, it becomes very costly to figure that out, or sometimes, you know, a new innovation is needed.  So that is the only thing I see which hampers adoption, but in essence I also see that to be the case with any technology, even if it’s internet or machine learning.  They have already covered that journey, or AI, that has already covered that journey.  

So when AI first started, I mean, it was so, so, so hard to solve any problem.  But then, you know, they kind of evolved, internet evolved.  The first days, or the early days of internet, I mean, HTML and CSS3 is what I can remember.  And it was so, so hard to create a website, and we all had those flashy websites.  And you know, internet has come a long way from then to now.  And I see that to happen with blockchain as so many new innovations are coming up.  

I mean, now you have blockchain domains that basically make sure that you know, your data is always secured, it cannot be taken away.  You have content that you can basically publish and make sure that you know it will never go away.  So a lot of things are coming off as a privacy centric.  A lot of people are realizing that Web 2.0 had some problems which Web 3.0 can solve.  Most of the problem kind of audits needs from a master client relationship, where the server is the master and whatever dictates all the clients they have to listen and Web 3.0 kind of solves that with a peer-to-peer connection, and you know, Blockchain is of course a part of it.  

So yeah, I see this to be more like a journey.  It’s always fun if you catch a train early on, because you know, you get to solve a problem, and you get to talk to awesome people like Diana, so yeah.

HOST:  Oh, thank you.  Thank you for saying that.  Yeah.  No, that just reminded me of all the video clips that I’ve seen lately come up from, you know, people on major TV networks from back in the early 90s talking about internet, you know, like, what is this internet thing?  Or like people, you know, seriously doubting Amazon and then, or even trying to describe what an e-mail address is like, what is this @ symbol and it’s so funny.  I think that that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now with blockchain, where it’s something that people in this space understand, but I think a lot of people even who work in crypto still have a hard time explaining crypto, and explaining blockchain.  And it’s probably something that we’ll look back on in 10 or 20 years and maybe, you know, giggle at the way that we try to explain the technology when it’s going to seem like second nature in the future, but at this point, it’s still so new and so hard to wrap our minds around.  

So I want to talk a little bit more about EPNS now.  You had mentioned previously Apple Push Notification.  So I think that’s a good comparison for what EPNS is doing for Web 3.0  So like right now, for instance, like all my devices are Apple, I’ve got a MacBook, and iPhone.  Whenever I get a text message, I get a push notification to all of my devices.  If I get e-mails, I get push notifications.  And so this is basically what you’re trying to build for Web 3.0 on Ethereum is the same sort of idea, right?

HARSH RAJAT:  Yes.  Actually, let me explain because, you know, a lot of people kind misconstrue us as a service when we are basically a communication middleware.  So to understand push notifications, you have to understand how they work.  And we can take Apple for this, as an example.  So basically, whatever notifications are happening on Apple, any app which wants to send notification to the user, they cannot send it directly.  What they do is that they send these notifications to middleware, which is from Apple, it’s called Apple Push Notification Service and any communication or notification flows through this middleware.  

Now this middleware basically is very important in their entire architecture, because it has two main jobs.  The first is, it kind of sequentializes every communication aspect.  So Apple as an ecosystem or operating system doesn’t have to listen to Facebook server, and WhatsApp server, and discord server and you don’t—1000s of apps and their servers, and then form those notifications, it will drain out the battery at an instance.  So this middleware makes sure that Apple as an operating system is only listening to this middleware.

And the second thing this middleware does is make sure that the app is not spamming the user.  So as long as the user opts in to receive the notification, only then the app or whatever notification they have sent can be flown out.  And this is what we are bringing in the decentralized world.  

Now, there are a couple of distinctions when we are talking about the Apple middleware, it’s basically tied to one ecosystem.  And that’s good that works for them, but when we are talking about Web 3.0, the Web 3.0 ecosystem is not closed, it’s open.  So Metamask is also in the ecosystem.  So is Trust Wallet, so is any other platform - - or any other Web 3.0 gateway.  So because of that, we needed to make sure that whatever communication layer we develop, it kind of follows an open standard.  So that’s one distinction.  

The other distinction is that we all, of course, realize that blockchain is still coming up.  So we cannot just rely on Web 3.0 open communication.  We also have to have updates from Web 3.0 to Web 2.0 to communication, and that’s what also EPNS supports.  So that’s why, you know, when we are sending a notification on blockchain, it is able to go on blockchain and then from that bridge comes to your mobile devices, which is from Apple.  So it kind of is going to our middleware to Apple middleware to you, and that’s one way to communicate.

The other way which we envision in the future and that’s our end goal is all the crypto wallets, they support EPNS protocol.  So then it comes like that, if you’re on Metamask, you just open your Metamask wallet, and voila, you have a notification from whatever service and that is coming from blockchain to blockchain.  

So yeah, those are kind of two distinctions that set us apart.  And of course, you know, Apple notification works very well, so of course, we have brought on certain ideas from their middleware as well.

HOST:  I think that’s so cool.  And I think one of the, you know, most awesome things about what you guys are doing is that, I think you’re encouraged—you’re really speeding up the, you know, getting the mainstream involved in Web 3.0.  Because I think a lot of people right now they maybe, you know, they’ve dabbled in crypto a little bit, bought a little bit of Bitcoin, they have a wallet, maybe they checked out crypto kitties, maybe they have an account, you know, somewhere else, maybe they have an Unstoppable Domain, like random things here and there, but I think most people haven’t really made the connection of putting all this together in Web 3.0.  And I think what you’re doing is making it a lot more user friendly for people to use Web 3.0.  

So for instance, like if I am—if I follow certain NFT artists, and I am waiting for one of them to have their next big drop, then I can set my push notification so that when the artists drops their next collection, I’ll get a notification.  So then I’ll know to log on to Nifty Gateway or wherever and I can go and buy that thing.  Or like if I’m getting paid in crypto, and I just got my paycheck and then I can get a push notification that says hey, you just got your paycheck.  I’m like okay, awesome, I can go on a shopping spree now, or I can go and buy whatever I’ve been waiting about, you know, like, it just makes things move a lot faster, and it helps users to be able to react in real time.

Are there any other like important use cases that you can think of just to give people more ideas of like how EPNS can really improve their user experience on Web 3.0?

HARSH RAJAT:  Definitely.  I mean, first of all, those are really amazing use cases.  It’s surprising that you know, as something as simple as someone sending you crypto, you don’t get the notification for it.  So yeah, we are very happy to be at the right place at the right time and being given the opportunity from the entire community to build this.  

The way we are building this is, we are making it extremely flexible.  Its content independent, that means that notifications can basically be anything you want it to be.  So it can be images, it can be called to action, it can be YouTube videos, but let’s not stop over there.  The way we think is that it can even carry out encrypted transaction, or it can even carry a payload that can basically transform into a decentralized video service in the future.  Kind of like all the things which happens on Web 2.0, like the FaceTime call you get, that’s a notification but it has a different payload and the entire system understands it, and then connects you to whoever you want to call or talk to, seem very have kept the content and the students really, really independent.  

So yeah, I mean, imagine a future where then, of course, NFTs artists, they are able to finally send to their fans that they have launched something new, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I mean, a decentralized video service comes in, and all of a sudden you have the decentralized video calls, or even go a bit further.  Let’s talk about gaming, if you know a gaming platform launches and you know, you have crypto kitties.  If you know something similar like that launches or you know you have a big card, which is put on auction that can also be taken care of. 

NFTs royalties, we can talk about royalties signing whenever the NFT sells in a secondary market.  The artist can get to know about the royalties, we can talk about on chain as well as off chain governance, because again, this is a communication layer that means we are not listening to on chain event.  We support on chain and off chain events.  

So yeah, I really depend on the imagination of the servers.  We are just providing them with a communication protocol that is just strong enough to handle everything and then we just say that, you know, go bonkers, just build whatever you want to build, guys.

HOST:  That’s awesome.  I can’t wait to see all the different use cases.  I mean, I’m sure there are so many use cases that I can’t even imagine right now that are going to pop up with you know, how you can use these push notifications.  

So EPNS is still relatively new.  Who’s your user base right now?  Is it sort of just like the hardcore crypto people that already have a lot of crypto and they’re using a lot of dApps?  And then, I guess how long, like in your ideal world, how long will it be until everybody or all crypto users are using EPNS?

HARSH RAJAT:  I really hope it’s not long, Diana.  But yeah, right now, I mean, we have users that care about the product.  We also now I have started getting traction with a lot of users who kind of realized that we are able to fill certain needs for them.  So right now, we have a massive—we have a massive gain in terms of subscribers on our protocol that—who just wants to receive payment alerts for the wallet.  So we launched a wallet tracker channel.  So basically, what you have to do is just go to app.epns.io, and you will see a list of channels; there’s gas fee tracking channel, there’s wallet tracker, and you know, a whole lot of other awesome channels as well.  So then you as a user, whatever channels you like, you just click on subscribe and after that the service will basically decide what to send you for gas fee.  

The service will send you about the highs and lows of gas for wallet tracker, you know, whoever sends you ETH, you will instantly get notified.  So finally, you know, at least for the payment part, we have solved some of it.  Hopefully, we’ll do more tokens soon, so yeah.

HOST:  Awesome.  And then I also was wondering too, like you what you’re doing is a brand new thing.  There are no other companies out there doing what you’re doing.  So what has that experience been like being first to the space, and the only one in the space, you know, you—like how has that been with trying to get resources, trying to learn trying to find market fit?  All of that stuff like has it just been a crazy ride?

HARSH RAJAT:  It has been.  It has been a crazy ride, but you know, when we started, Diana; Matt from Unstoppable Domain, we got connected like really early on.  And it was because you know, in a Medium article, I wrote that I liked Doom and Matt also likes Doom, so yeah, that’s, that’s the reason we got connected.  But yeah, he helped us a ton in understanding the space and making connects.  Same with Ethereum Foundation, we wrote to Ethereum Foundation and they said, this sounds really cool, let’s help you guys build it.  Same with almost every community, Ethereum community member who we have met, especially the people who have built Ethereum like Unstoppable Domains, even Uniswap, Gitcoin.  

So all of them, they basically like the idea, and they were basically there as our mentors to guide us and to basically make us not feel scared or lonely.  So we definitely haven’t been lonely just because of these awesome people.  Of course, it’s exciting to build something which has never been built before.  Of course, we know that because it’s never been built before, it will probably break a ton before we get just the right fit.  So that’s why we say that we are on - - and we are trying to work and iron those features out.  But yeah, very exciting, and I mean, for me, it becomes like a challenge to solve this, and I always love solving tech problems.  

So for me it’s like really, really exciting.  I don’t know how—what my team members feel about it, but yeah, I really enjoy it.

HOST:  Yeah, for sure.  I mean no risk no reward, it’s kind of like, the this is just like a whole adrenaline—next level adrenaline rush right being—not only being a founder, but being first in your space as well.  

Another thing I wanted to ask you about is you recently announced that you’ll be releasing a new token called the Push token that will allow anybody that has the token to vote on core functionalities of the EPNS protocol.  So tell me a little bit more about that?

HARSH RAJAT:  Sure.  So of course, Push is a governance token it made sense to call it Push, Ethereum Push Notification Service, and push just has that vibe, and we expect a lot of memes around it secretly.  So that’s, that’s also not that reason, but yeah, coming back to the point, Push is a governance token, but it also has certain other things that we have built into the token itself.  

The first thing we realized was that because we are the first, we have to make sure that we design a game theory around the entire ecosystem, in a way that, you know, everyone vents, whether it’s the users, the services, the wallet app, the crypto wallets, or the token holders, and basically push enables that.  It carries a lot of incentives, it carries its own version of liquidity mining, what we call usage finding.  So in essence, we will incentivize third party developers who come and build useful notification on top of the protocol, by giving them these tokens.  That’s the second—that’s the second use case of Push.  

The third use case of Push is the fee split, so we of course, realize that for this to have a very huge network effect, we need to integrate the Push protocol or EPNS protocol to all the user wallets, and then you know, they are—because they are part of the ecosystem.  It’s an open ecosystem, it’s not like a closed ecosystem that we only have our app.  We want this to be integrated at Metamask verse, or you know, whoever has a wallet. 

And the design, you know the game theory behind designing the Push token is that if these crypto wallets, they integrate the protocol, then through governance, they can basically pass or move a proposal that hey, I’m bringing 10,000 users or a million users to the protocol network or the notification network, which means that I think I should take 30% of the fee that will be generated by the protocol.  And if the governance passes, you know, of course they can take that.  

So that’s one more use case of the Push, of course, because the token holders are going to be governing everything, so we have some great rewards for them as well, in all the three use cases.  So yeah, that’s the game to the—about Push, in general, kind of governs, it rewards the users, and it makes sure that you know, whoever participates in the ecosystem, they basically have a fair use and incentive to support our protocol.

HOST:  That’s awesome.  And do you have a timeline yet for when people will be able to get involved with Push?

HARSH RAJAT:  Sure.  So we actually have an IDO happening around 13th April, so it’s going to be very, very soon.  Right now, we are going to be launching on Uniswap.  We are doing IDO with - -.  Though, just a heads-up, guys.  A lot of people who kind of who kind of—who kind of are scamsters.  So just be careful, just—just visit our website epns.io, and go from there, that’s good.  

In terms of governance and protocol, as I said, we are ever obscene.  So we are going to be launching the mainnet flow protocol around early Q3, if everything goes smoothly, and that’s why we are doing pilot collabs for all the top projects in the ecosystem.  One of the reasons is that the V1 of the middleware communication layer need to be very, very strong in supporting each of their functionalities.  So right now, we are at that phase, so very, very close to launching V1, but yeah, it’s not the end of the journey.  I mean, we already planned for V2, we already have a roadmap.  In essence, we want - - to come not only from layer one of Ethereum, but also from layer twos.  And then later on, we want to expand it to the entire Web 3.0 ecosystem.  So yeah, we are kind of brainstorming on the best way to do that.  It seems like that we’ll probably be launching this - - P2P nodes, or Push nodes as we call it, but more on that later.  I think I already gave a lot more of it than I intend to do.  So yeah.

HOST:  So we got some exclusives on this podcast.  No, that was perfect.  I was just going to ask you what’s new for EPNS in the next year, the rest of 2021, and the next year, and you just gave us—you answered that and gave us even more.  So that’s awesome.  

Last question for you is where do you see this whole space being in 10 years?  So have you had to envision where we’re going to be in 10 years; how we’re going to be operating, you know, the way we’re going to be thinking about this technology.  Describe that scenario to me as much as you can.

HARSH RAJAT:  That’s easy, to the moon.  I mean jokes aside, I mean in 10 years, so we just have to look back, a lot of people forget to look back, I mean, 2010 Bitcoin was launched.  People never realized that we will be talking about NFTs and we—you know, 69 million NFT has been sold, and DeFi, and flash loans, and zero collaterals.  So yeah, I mean, if someone would have said at that point of time, you know, with blockchain, you can take a loan and you don’t really have to raise any collateral for that.  Maybe you know, that person would have thought that this guy is out of his mind, but yeah, that became a possibility.  

So, again in 10 years, I mean, I definitely see a whole lot of use cases coming up, which we haven’t really thought about.  DeFi is just two years old for crying out loud.  So yeah, we don’t really—we are just, I mean, we have just arrived or announced to the world that we have arrived.  It’s not just about trading, it’s not just about speculation; here are the use cases.  You can build a global bank out of it.  You can even build a bank which has different rules than your traditional banking system, and you know, that was not really possible before.  And you know, because of that, it kind of, it kind of created a gap in innovation.  Because, because, you know, when you had to create a bank, or when you had to create a financial segment, you had to go through so many loops and so many regulations, that you cannot really just to innovate or experiment, but with DeFi you can do that, you can create your own game theory around it, and you know, if it’s liked by the people, it can become the next global bank.

I see in 10 years that you know; we’ll have at least several banks using their own smart contracts.  And making sure that the user transacts on it.  I see that technology to become more invisible, just like the internet.  I mean, right now we are talking on our video protocol.  So right now, we have like, three or four protocols that are working in conjunction to make sure that this podcast is happening.  But you know, we don’t really get to know about that.  I see the same effort going or getting into blockchain and the entire ecosystem as a whole.  

I see two or three more inventions happening which I cannot really predict about.  I think no one can.  So yeah, at least one thing I know that even in the next 10 years, we will not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is.  So yeah, - - we are all Satoshis, so yeah.

HOST:  Okay.  All right, awesome.  I love the prediction to the moon.  So to wrap up, I’ve got two questions that I received on Twitter, from people who had some questions for you.  The first one is from somebody from Vegas.  He says, “I have Ether drops bot which gives me notifications on my telegram about my wallet transactions.  So why do I need to have EPNS?”

HARSH RAJAT:  Got it.  So exactly this is the thing, which we covered in the start.  If you really think about it, Ether bots is a service which is using their logic then they’re forming notification, which you’re giving to Telegram.  Then Telegram as a service is probably interacting with either Apple ecosystem or Google ecosystem and sending that notification out.  So what we are building is a decentralized version of the app load the Google Push Notification Service.  We are not building services on top of that middleware.  

If you have to think about it, again, I’ll go back to the internet.  I think that has been my favorite analogy.  So right now someone can be Facebook, someone can be Google, someone can be - -.  And they are basically using internet which becomes a communication layer, to communicate whatever they want to the users.  EPNS is that communication layer.

It basically provides communication layer to the Ethereum platform, which other services can use to send notification about anything, even wallets, even notifications about your podcast, NFTs or anything in general.  So yeah, in a way, I mean, TLDR they talk a lot, Telegram, the bot in telegram, it basically is interacting with the communication layer of Telegram to send notification out to you.  That communication layer of Telegram is what we are building for Web 3.0, and not that bot.

HOST:  Got it.  And then the second question is from Jigsaw Conferences.  “What would you say are the main strengths and weaknesses to date for this project and where do you see the project in five years?”  Like that question.

HARSH RAJAT:  Well, I like the question, but it’s a hard question to answer.  So yeah, strengths and weaknesses of the project.  Strengths; we are the first ones to do it.  Lucky to be at the right place at the right time, have really, really awesome people to support us.  That’s also a strength, because we can tap onto their experience.  So it’s a commodity not many people realize is needed whenever you are innovating.  You cannot do it by yourself.  Anyone who says that he did a project by themselves is probably lying or probably not aware of all the people helping them out.

Community as well; community love is a strength.  The tech part, I kind of know what sort of tech we want to do.  So that’s kind of like, I’ll not call it a strength because we know that vision what we want to achieve, but we also know that there will be challenges that will come.  So let’s check that out of the strengths.  

The weaknesses, I mean, we wish we do this really, really soon. But we know that, you know, when we are building something which is one of the first, it needs to be tested really, really thoroughly.  We don’t want to build up a Bitcoin that in two or three years has a security issue, and because of that, you know, everything collapses.

So yeah, with weaknesses, I mean, the way forward is clear, but we also know that there will be different pivots and different directions which we have to take in order to make sure that the project, and the communication layer as a whole is really powerful.  

So yeah, I don’t know if that answers the weaknesses part or not, but right now, that’s the VIP.

HOST:  Yeah, I mean, no, I think that does answer the question.  I would almost see that as like flipping it around.  I’d almost see that as a strength, because you guys have already built your team up to what; is it 15 people, and I’m sure you’re, you know, quickly growing you’ve got a ton of funding, so I definitely see you guys building this up, you know, in as quickly as humanly possible to do something like so brand new and so cutting edge.  So I think—I think you guys are doing great.  

Well, Harsh, I really appreciate you taking the time to be here and to tell us more about EPNS.  I really think this is the future, I think you know, in 10 years, everybody’s going to be using EPNS so I’m really excited to see where you guys go with this, and how it gets built out.  

Before you go just tell everybody where they can find you if they want to connect with you personally?  And then also epsn.io is the website, but remind people again, what they can do on the website right away to, you know, maybe keep tabs of the governance token, Push that you have coming out and then also to be ready to test out the V1 when it launches in probably Q3 of this year.

HARSH RAJAT:  Awesome, awesome.  So yeah, guys.  So as Diana said, go to epns.io.  And from that go to any of our official channels like Telegram or Twitter, but more than that, you know, there’s a section over there that takes you to app.epns.io, which is our dApp, where then you can explore all the cool features that we are building, as well as, seeing the notifications and action.  While we are on obscene.  We are delivering live notifications from in that.  Of course, you know, you need to have, you need to check our dApp out and download the mobile app out, but you have all the instructions over there.  

So yeah, should definitely do check us out, and then you know, come on Telegram if you want to chat with us, like long, long conversations, then yeah, head to Telegram.  We are at EPNS Project, but yeah, much better way is follow the website.  Remember we are launching our Push tokens on 13th of April, and we are only going to do it on - - at IDO and then follow up after that on Uniswap.  We are not going to do any flash sales, we are not going to do anything other than what you see on the website.  

So yeah, please be careful guys.  This space is very oily, and because of that there are a lot of people who try to take advantage of new users.  So yeah, whenever in doubt, or whenever someone says that you only have one hour to do something, never do that.  That’s my only advice.

HOST:  Very good advice and very good reminder, and then of course you can also go follow Harsh and message him directly on Twitter at Harsh Rajat.  

Well, thank you so much, Harsh.  I really appreciate you taking the time again, and had a great conversation with you.  Thank you listeners for tuning in, and we’ll be back again soon with another episode of the Unstoppable Podcast.

HARSH RAJAT:  Thank you for having me, Diana.