Episode 22: Jaf | EPNS - The Missing Piece of Web3 Infrastructure
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The Missing Piece of Web3 Infrastructure
Timestamps
00:00 - 00:44 - Crypto Sapiens Introduction
00:46 - 01:23 - EPNS Introduction - What the project entails
01:24 - 01:55 - Jaf - product and the dev lead at EPNS Introduction
01:57 - 03:29 - Jaf career before web3
03:32 - 04:45 - Jaf transition into web3 ecosystem
04:47 - 05:49 - How Jaf landed in EPNS
05:53 - 09:44 - What does EPNS entails
09:46 - 12:28 - EPNS as a governance notification tool running on multichain
12:30 - 14:58 - Activating and using EPNS notification features
15:00 - 17:56 - EPNS solving some DAOs problem especially in Governance
17:58 - 20:57 - EPNS notification integration to alert members on their phone
20:59 - 29:00 - EPNS present and future partnership/Integration
29:01 - 29:17 - ENS domain connection
29:18 - 31:23 - EPNS notification, flexibility and it’s open permissionless features
31:25 - 33:00 - The EPNS $PUSH token
33:02 - 36:50 - EPNS Proof of Humanity
36:52 - 38:10 - Some of the value EPNS is adding to DAO and the entire web3 space
38:11 - 38:55 - EPNS push grant program application
38:56 – Outro
[00:00:00] Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lightly discussions with innovative web3 builders. To help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum Bitcoin, and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Cryptos Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
[00:00:45] Hello everyone, and we are back with another episode of Crypto Sapiens. Today we are talking to Jaf who is a product and the dev lead at EPNS, otherwise known as Ethereum Push Notification Service. They position themselves as the protocol for blockchain-based notifications that are chain agnostic, platform-independent and incentivized. Some of the use cases we discuss are loan liquidation notifications, ENS name expiration notifications, and becoming a tool for DAO governance that allows members to vote directly from the notification as Jaf said, EPNS is a tool for reactive and proactive management and with that, let's get started.
[00:01:24] Jaf: I'm Jeff. I am the business development and operations lead at EPNS, it's awesome to be here just because It's the opportunity to talk about EPNS and share with everyone here what are the possibilities, what
can you build? This to me, is a tool for everybody in general, as it gives everybody the opportunity in the web3 to communicate effectively with their users. So that's what we are going to talk about here.
[00:01:57] Humpty Calderon: But before we do, I think it's really wonderful to learn about the people that are behind the project, without sharing more than what you would want to share, you know, where did you get started? What's that web 2 experience that you had prior to jumping into this ecosystem?
[00:02:13] Jaf: I started working back in 2002. I've been working for quite a long time already, like most of the people who started, at least where I live. I live in Costa Rica by the way, born and raised in Costa Rica and most people start as software developers. So my background for the yearly years of my career is in software development. I did my first year of software development and because of different things, I moved from software development into the project management side of things, did a little program management and everything in that area for almost 10 years. The Funny thing is I was working on the tech side of The Pest control industry and that's always funny to say because, Pest control is an industry that people don't think has a tech side or behind the scenes. And I did work almost a decade in that industry before I moved a hundred percent into crypto.
[00:03:21] Humpty Calderon: That's interesting, so you were beating software bugs while other people were beating the real bugs.
[00:03:28] Jaf: Exactly that was my thing.
[00:03:32] Humpty Calderon: That's really awesome. When did you make that decision to jump into the web 3 ecosystem and what kind of inspired you to do that? Or what was like that motivating factor?
[00:03:44] Jaf: During my career, I did meet a ton of people. 4 years ago, one of my former managers asked me if I was able to jump in and help in a small project. I didn't know what It was supposed to be like a fantasy cricket software or something. That's all I knew and when I jumped into the project, I realized that it was blockchain. That was the very first time in my life that I heard about blockchain or Bitcoin or anything similar to this, and It turns out they were building a fantasy cricket league software. I participated in the project and that was the start of it. It lasted for 8 months or something. It didn't even go live. But from that moment I was sold. At that moment I realized that it was something that I was passionate about. It changed my mind, and it turned me into a student again, and that's why I decided to come fully on this.
[00:04:47] Humpty Calderon: So how did you end up joining EPNS
[00:04:50] Jaf: After that project ended, I started participating in several different projects. I started trying to join different projects and I joined one, it's called Project Hydro, and they were in the identity solutions side of things, and that's where I met Harsh & Richa. They are the founders of EPNS. We collaborated together for a very short time. It was just a couple of months maybe, but it was great. We really clicked for the very first time. I continued in that project for almost a year, and we didn't talk much during that time but after some time, they told me about this project they were building, I was already following them, what they were doing, and they invited me to join and here I am 2 years later.
[00:05:41] Humpty Calderon: It sounds like you've kind of built up quite a reputation in this space and have collaborated with a few folks, on several projects.
[00:05:48] Jaf: I like to think that
[00:05:53] Humpty Calderon: So now that we've got a nice introduction to who you are, and you know what inspired that transition from Web 2 to the Web 3 space, and even the journey within that to get you to EPNS, Let's talk about EPNS. What is it about?
[00:06:08] Jaf: The one-liner is that EPNS brings notifications to the space. We realized at some point that communication was broken in the web3. I used to tell this to people, but this is not the nineties, right? In the nineties, you were expected to go check your email to check if there was something for you, that was the users going to fetch information by themselves, but we're not there anymore. Right now, most probably when you wake up in the morning, you already have 10 notifications waiting for you on your phone. And in the web 3 space, we don't have that, or we didn't have that before EPNS came in. because that's what we're building. We're building communication channels that will allow services and protocols to create effective communication channels with their user bases and we are talking about sending notifications about stuff that matters to them. We have a ton of use cases that we have been working on with several different protocols. Maybe we can talk about that Humpty, and the interesting thing is when you realize that this is a very simple idea that we're all used to, but we just don't have it in the web 3 right now. That's the idea behind EPNS
[00:07:24] Humpty Calderon: I'm going to correct you because I was not getting emails. I was using a beeper in the nineties, and I got my notifications pretty quickly. And if we can get some sort of hack to make beepers fashionable again. Literally just my web 3 beeper. I was like, Oh, check that out. Like I got an offer for, you know, this NFT, that's really fun except you know, that would be fun. Anyways, I digress there, but no, you're right. I mean, I think in terms of communications even in the space outside of crypto, it's still pretty archaic. Like email of course, it is still very usable, very functionable, but you know, it isn't really necessary, it's not easy to find because let’s say you have an important email, it's probably buried under a ton of other spam, and you're like, Oh my gosh. Like I'd never received it. It's like, did you, didn't you? It's probably under the other 20 emails that you ignored.
[00:08:20] Jaf: Yes, I guess for us, this is the internet of money, so you can receive a notification at 2:00 AM in the morning, and it could be a farm bill or any other game that you used to play or your kid installed on your phone, but If you do get a notification at 2:00 AM in the morning saying that your loan is about to get liquidated, then you care about that one, and that's part of the use cases. Originally when we started Defi was definitely one of the industries that was most interesting at first because it just makes sense. There are so many defi platforms that are offering loans or other alternatives or products for the users and I want to use the loan example because it just makes a lot of sense. when you're getting notification, basically it's not only information that you will get, saying “Hey you're being liquidated”. But you get a call to action with each notification. That means that if you get a notification at 2:00 AM in the morning saying your loan on this platform is starting to get liquidated, you click it, and then the notification itself will actually take you to the platform where you can take action and fix your loan. If you start thinking EPNS becomes not a tool for notifications, but a tool that helps with user engagement and user retention.
[00:09:46] Humpty Calderon: I'm going to put a pin on that because I really do want to dig into that because I saw something in some of the research that one of the things that EPNS can help is with surfacing or notifying people about governance, because everybody raises their hand be like, I want to be part of this governance, or I want to be a part of this multisig but when it comes time to actually do something about that, it's like, it's very hard to convert people either because they never saw it right? or because maybe there's no urgency in terms of the way that we currently communicate. There is a governance proposal that needs to be passed, So I really want to explore that and I want to hear your thoughts on it, but I want to rewind just a little bit and I want to explore the name and kind of the way that it works both on Ethereum and potentially even across other blockchains so the name Ethereum Push Notification Services, does that mean that this works only on Ethereum?
[00:10:52] Jaf: Great question. It doesn't mean that, it means that we started in Ethereum, we love Ethereum. We have a special place in our hearts for Ethereum. But we realized that going multi-chain is something that we need to do. It's a need. There are many things happening in many different chains that we cannot stay on Ethereum only. That being said, we are going to Polygon first. I will explain a little bit about our solution architecture in a second, you understand how we made it easy to go to other chains but I also wanted to mention that last year during the Solana BreakPoint event, Harsh, our founder, he put up a great demo of EPNS running on top of Solana and that we're cross-chain compatible among other important characteristics of the project, like being platform agnostic and other things.
So our infrastructure or our solution architecture, in general, is that we have one core contract that recites only on Ethereum. That core contract will take care of creating channels, fees, fleet, governance-related aspects. but we created another type of contract that we call a communicator. The communicator is the contract that we actually deploy on other chains that enables us to communicate with a core contractor to do validation and other things. One of the most critical pieces in this whole architecture is the push notes, the peer-to-peer network of push notes that we have, which is the network that will take care of retrieving and dispatching notifications to where they need to go.
[00:12:30] Humpty Calderon: So how do I get those notifications then? Say I've set one up, where am I going to get that?
[00:12:36] Jaf: Great. There are right now, three main ways to receive notifications. We have a mobile app in 2 flavors, iOS and android. We have a Chrome browser extension that sits right next to your meta mask and you get notifications right there and we also have our dApp, but on top of it we produced and we are releasing SDKs and libraries that we are sharing with the developer's community that they can do integrations by themselves. And that is, if you have an idea, you have your own product. Let's say you're an individual contributor, then you can plug in super easy as long as you have a channel running, you can plug in super easy to the network and throw your notifications that you need to send to the network of notes, and they will take care of dispatching them
[00:13:20] Humpty Calderon: Interesting. Do you foresee a future where EPNS will operate natively on Discord. I only ask that because I think maybe not a good thing, but a lot of the communications for many web 3 projects reside on discord and we probably don't want to put it right in the main server, but maybe there's like some sort of DM attribute that allows for you to see is like, Oh, I got a new message here, I need to check that out and it kind of gives you a list of notifications from your entire wherever you've integrated, wherever you're participating.
[00:13:57] Jaf: That is a great question. We were in fact in conversations with different teams about integrations that might come from Discord or other tools, let's say Twitter or any other social channel network. But the answer is yes. At the end, EPNS has to be considered a building block, one more building block not only the defi space, but a building block for the web3, because what it does is enabling that communication channel in any way you want to implement it. If that's the idea that you have in your mind is creating a bot that will trigger messages to your wallet address after some event happens, then that's doable because you will just add the EPNS block to your solution and you will be able to trigger notifications to wallet addresses directly. It opens the stage for developers to get really creative and we have seen a lot of creativity already floating around to create solutions based on whatever are your needs.
[00:15:00] Humpty Calderon: All right, let's go back to where we put our pins earlier, in terms of getting these notifications for things that are probably missed regularly. You know, you talked a little bit about defi, which I think is hugely important. Obviously we saw market corrections recently and people hopefully were paying attention, got a note, were signed in, and were able to make the changes. But if they weren't and they're not keeping up with market conditions, probably there were some negative effects to that.
So, EPNS can surely benefit from that. But aside from that, I think one of the things that we've seen tremendous growth in over the past years are DAOs, therefore with governance what are some of your thoughts EPNS can help with, maybe some of the things that are not even currently being built, but like the vision for the future.
[00:15:56] Jaf: Awesome question. I really like the governance side of things for EPNS. Here's the thing. We have been, reached out, reached out by different protocols that, with the same feeling, moving governance is sometimes clunky or slow. We have heard all sorts of words to define how difficult it is to move governance properly. Because of what you are saying, there's voter apathy, there's a lot of things that should be better if you want to have effective governance and an effective community behind your project. One of the things that we have been doing is, whenever, for example, there is a new notification, let's say in a snapshot or any other platform, but whenever there is a new notification, you can’t at that moment trigger a notification to your user base or to whoever wants to be notified about governance updates. You can trigger a notification immediately saying, Hey, there is a new proposal, You get it on your phone, You can read what it is about right, and if you click it, you can redirect the user whether you want to redirect the user to that voting platform, or maybe you want to redirect the user to where the discussion is happening. But to add a little bit more to your question, you mentioned what's coming in the future, something that is coming very soon that I'm really excited about is that not only you will get a notification saying, here's the proposal, Read it, vote on it. But you will be able to cast your vote from the notification itself. Your notification comes in with let's say through Budds, For against, or abstain. Let's say, and you will be able to cast your vote from that notification and that's cool because sometimes as crazy as it sounds, maybe users will not want to go to the platform to cast their vote. But if you make it even easier, maybe they know what the proposal is about, then you can cast your vote right there and need an answer.
[00:17:58] Humpty Calderon: I think one of the things that you are bringing up, well firstly, one of the major challenges I think with Web 3 currently is the user experience which is very poor and I think that's okay currently because we are in build mode, we're in growth mode, we're a bunch of hackers and we're just trying to leverage the technology and build out utility and a lot of times we forget that there are real people on the other end with various levels of expertise. There's a lot of improvement that is possible in the user experience of Web 3. One thing that you've stood out to me in what you just described there, where directly from the notification you can act reminds me of e-commerce in web 2, where there is the option to add it to the cart, you know, and select all these things, and then eventually buy, or just the buy now button. It will be like, let's reduce the friction to motivate people, in this case, spend money. They design that in a way because they realize if somebody puts it in the cart, the likelihood is, eh, they'll forget about it. They're not going to do anything about it and then they are going to make sure they engage with you again and bring you back onto the page and buy it. I think the same thing can be said in terms of governance is like how many steps are there for me to actually vote? Like unless I'm on snapshot every day, the likelihood is that it's quite a few. Like I'm going to see a tweet that's maybe going to take me to the forum to read what the proposal's about, which then going to take me to maybe some sort of soft governance where it's on discord to say yay and Nay, and then maybe takes me to snapshot to do the vote. Now I'm probably overcomplicating that but just to show an example that there's a few steps in order to just act and participate in that governance. I like what you're saying, where it's like, look, I mean, hopefully, you're engaged enough in the project that you're supporting where you see a notification, the information that is shared with you is reasonable, and you can make a decision from that and act and participate in that governance.
[00:20:13] Jaf: You know I'm not sure if you remember, but back in the day, it was like a year and a half ago, maybe, there was like one week where crypto Twitter was all about save Yam because there was some voting or something that needed to be done.
Humpty Calderon: I remember that
Jaf: Exactly. If you got into crypto Twitter, that's all you were able to see all day long. Save yam and people calling everybody else to do something. That's the important part of what If you didn't keep an eye on our social networks, You didn't keep an eye on this discord, You didn't get a message from a friend. What if you didn't get any of those, but if you get a notification, a push notification right to your phone, then most likely you will take action.
[00:20:59] Humpty Calderon: So what are some of the integrations? you mentioned you wanted to talk about the partnerships that EPNS has been building, what projects are you talking to? What kind of integrations can we look forward to in terms of EPNS being rolled out in the future or maybe some of those that are already in effect.
[00:21:18] Jaf: We have more than 40 collaborations confirmed right now, I think we have 29 channels in production. The thing is we launched on mainnet on January 11th, and we have been consistently releasing one channel a day. That's part of our rollout strategy. We have a ton of channels in the defi space. We have collaborations with dYdX, Oasis, CBI, and many other important protocols in the space bankless as well. Bankless is actually a cool case because they decided to make a hybrid channel, where they notify users about stuff that matters to them from their platform as a user of the platform, but they also use the same channel to send notifications about governance. That's a cool idea that they did there. We also have channels, I keep calling them channels, but those are collaborations with protocols in other spaces, like in the services space and that's important because EPNS is not only a tool that will allow protocols to be reactive and communicate something to the users after something happened but you can use it as a tool that is more proactive and you will try to do good things for your users. One example is the ENS domain, nobody wants to lose their ENS domain, and there is a channel that we have that will start alerting you seven days before the expiration of your domain, that your domain is about to expire. The call to action in there is taking you to the renewal page so that you can go and renew your domain. Same goes for pool together. Like if you're the winner of the lottery, you might have a million dollars waiting for you in your wallet you don't know about, because you didn't keep an eye on the social networks or you didn't keep an eye on twitter, What if you get a notification saying, Hey, you just want a million dollars and go here to cash out. That's what we are building and on top of it, we have other important channels that we are releasing very soon, like a wallet tracker that is in case you want to know if something happened with your wallet, whether that's something that came into your wallet or out of your wallet b
ut if you're not obvious to your computer, you better know that something happened and that's part of the things, and I think it was important to mention this because it shows how EPNS has become a tool for reactive cases and proactive cases.
[00:23:49] Humpty Calderon: I like the fact that you talk about ENS because it just reminds me also of some of the similarities in terms of naming convention, but also the flexible ecosystem in the fact that it doesn't just operate on Ethereum, just to note that and it'll make it a little more difficult because I am keeping an eye on a few ENS domains that I would like to have and I was like, Oh, it's about to expire. I'm keeping an eye on that in case you forget, but, you know, if EPNS is out there, they're going to be reminded, not going to be able to get the ENS domains that I would like to acquire.
[00:24:25] Jaf: Well, but that's where developers come in. They can create a channel for you to keep an eye on the domains that you want.
[00:24:32] Humpty Calderon: No, that's fun. I mean it's a fun exercise in just kind of enriching the ecosystem, I guess, and I like the fact that EPNS is kind of being built in partnership with a lot of these projects, in terms of the way that it's integrated, and already adding value to some of these protocols in the ecosystem. One thing that I would like to learn because I haven't yet tried, how easy is it to create a notification. When I hear EPNS for some reason in my head, I think of this platform called IFTT (If this, then that) and I go in there and I create recipes, like I want to create a notification, send me a DM on Twitter when this happens. Is it that easy or what's the current state of it? and is that the end goal or is it being iterated on.
[00:25:27] Jaf: We are getting there right now, creating a channel for you, let's say as a content producer, and let me bring this analogy so we get everybody on the same page. The analogy is a YouTube channel. If you're a content producer and you want your followers to know what you have been releasing, then you create a channel on YouTube and your followers can opt-in to receive notifications from you. That's the whole idea with EPNS when you create a channel in EPNS, it will allow you to communicate with your user base in a direct fashion to their user wallet. Right now, if you want to create a channel, it takes five minutes from the moment you start creating the channel to the moment you send your first notification and you can send 2 types of notifications right now. There will be a third one next week. You can send a broadcast notification, which will go to your entire user base. That is, for example, there is a new Crypto Sapiens event happening, go check it out and you send the link
[00:26:24] Humpty Calderon: You know where I'm going with this. Go on.
[00:26:29] Jaf: All right. But you can also have targeted notifications, which was the example I was mentioning about deFi when you want to communicate something to a user specifically it's private to the user. Let's say, very soon, next week, most likely, we are going to release, a subset notification which is precisely that sometimes you want to communicate to a specific subset of your user base, not everybody. So, in the case of defi, let's bring in defi again, but in the case of defi, sometimes you might have basic traders versus advanced traders, and you want to send different sign notes to each team. Then you will be able to do that. Now, in regard to what you were saying, comparing it to the IFTT platform, we are getting there, right now USA users will not have those capabilities right now if you go to the EPNS dApp. But as a developer, you already have a ton more capabilities If you start creating a solution from the developer perspective, because our framework that we offer to create channels and whatnot, it comes with a scheduling engine that lets you be very very flexible and as granular as you want, you can check for events happening, block by block if you want. Or you can set recurrence rules that say, no, I want to check this every one hour, once a day, or things like that. It gives you a ton of flexibility. You are not limited to consuming data from web 3 sources, you can consume data from other sources like APIs or sub-graphs or any other thing that comes to your mind as long as you prepare a message that matches the protocol standards, and you will be able to set it. But we are making it easier for users that are not developers so that they can create more dynamic notifications.
[00:28:21] Humpty Calderon: I think that's going to be huge. Not that it's not huge already, but like really empowering individuals to be able to control features like that, I think is definitely something I'm sure the demand is already there for people to curate their own ecosystem in terms of what they want to interact with more regularly, or it's like, Oh, you know, I really wish I was in the BanklessDAO discord more often or on their forum, but I just don't have the time or I'm busy doing something else, but I want to curate my experience to be able to engage with what's important to me as it becomes available. So, I think that's really amazing.
[00:29:01] Jaf: Humpty, you mentioned something about you, with the ENS example you keep an eye on some domains that you like, but there is the other side. What if you have multiple wallets with multiple ENS domains?
[00:29:15] Humpty Calderon: How did you know? I do.
[00:29:18] Jaf: Why did I bring this topic up again? Because wallet bundling is coming as well, it's about creating a one-stop shop for users on one single application, you will get notifications from all your different wallets, from all the different services that matter to you. And it doesn't mean that every wallet that you have will receive notifications from the same set of services, but you can have one wallet that you are using for deFi, one wallet for NFTs, and you will get all the different notifications on the same app or browser extension.
[00:29:51] Humpty Calderon: Wait, is this all permissionless or do developers need to reach out to the EPNS team currently to do these things
[00:29:58] Jaf: No, it's open, permissionless and another beautiful thing is that being open and permissionless, we cannot take any arbitrary decision as to who can create a channel or not. But the cool thing is governance is also something that we are developing right now. And in the future, let's say a channel is created and they start becoming a bad actor. They start sending notifications they're not, I don't get to say if they are good or bad, but governance as a whole, they will be able to take that decision. We have spam controls, or we call it spam score and what it does is that if you start acting wrong, then your spam score, it's going to be an algorithmic implementation of a spam score. The spam score will start struggling down your notifications giving you the opportunity to pivot into good behavior.
If you do, then that's fine. You're going to go back to normal. But if you don't, then your notifications are going to start getting spaced from the moment you can start sending notifications, and not only when you can send notifications, but how many notifications you can send until you get to the point where you get to zero, you don't get to send anything. The beautiful part of it is that governance will play a role on this, and governance will get to decide if a channel needs to be shooted down or something like that.
[00:31:25] Humpty Calderon: Thank you for leading us there. The push token. Let's talk about that because I think it has something to do with governance. Does it?
[00:31:36] Jaf: It has everything to do with governance.
Humpty Calderon: Perfect
Jaf: That's a great question and there is a little more. It's really cool. The push token we launched last year in April. Push token is a governance token, like most governance tokens it'll allow token holders to participate in the direction of the product. It has a really cool feature that is not active yet, but it'll be activated in the future. I'm talking about this year. you as a token holders, when governance decides to activate service fees, that is services, there will be a fee for them to send notifications and use the protocol. We're going to follow a traditional software-as-a-service model, so there's going to be a fee. When governance decides to activate service fees, there's also going to be another feature that is attached to the token. Really cool. It's called fee split, and that is that US token holders will get a share of the fees collected from the services, but that's also a decision that governance will be taken and that's why we are being super careful in making things right with our governance, making sure that everybody is learning not only how to play their governance roles, but also how critical these decisions will come in the future.
[00:33:02] Humpty Calderon: All right, that's excellent. One thing that I also saw here in the research leading up to this event is that a part of the goal is to do some sort of proof of humanity integration, going back to early in our discussion when you were doing the introduction, you were talking about like your personal experience working in the identity space, and then we also talked about, being able to identify the different types of participants within an ecosystem where you have, I guess more novice traders or irregular traders that are not as active and maybe more of a professional trader. So I wonder, What is the goal with integrating Identity Solutions? and what are some of the novel ways that you imagine them being able to help with maybe, realizing some of these distinctions or making some of these distinctions and then creating a more empowering ecosystem for everyone, especially those that are probably more active in Web 3.
[00:34:04] Jaf: Thanks for bringing the Proof of Humanity example because that is an example that is definitely not defi, It has a defi aspect. But it's cool that you mention it because there are many protocols that in order to be a participant of their protocol, it's more like a staged type of thing. In the case of proof of humanity, for example, if you submit your profile to be accepted in proof of humanity, then it doesn't get approved immediately. So, what are you going to do here? Are you going to keep visiting proof of humanity every day to see if you were accepted or not? What we are doing with them is helping the process in general so that everybody stays communicated at all times because whenever you submit your profile, there is a fee that you need to pay for it. And there could come a challenge as well. If somebody challenges you, that is not only the risk of your profile being taken down from the platform, that is your deposit that you put when you submitted your profile, that is also at risk. So that is a perfect example of EPNS helping a process-oriented protocol that is not reacting to one action that happens and you mentioned something also really interesting. Right now, everybody's super privacy-centric, especially in this space. Of course. Nobody wants to give away their information about names or even Twitter handles or anything like that, or email or anything like that. One of the things you know is ideas that we get from discord and other channels, but there are ways where EPNS can help identifying or helping with identity. One of the cool ideas that was brought up the other day is, you know how we have 2-factor authentication in the web 2 world. Let's say when you go to your bank, you have to do 2-factor authentication but it doesn't exist as a web 3 native tool, what if you could come to your DFI platform that you want to use, and, you get a 2-factor authentication message, send directly to your wallet that you can verify that it's actually you who's trying to do something against the platform.
[00:36:25] Humpty Calderon: That's interesting. I mean the identity ecosystem as a whole I think is starting to gain a lot of traction. I think the demand in defi, DAOs in terms of being able to create better onboarding experiences, being able to incentivize people who are actively participating in the ecosystem. I think those are some of the things that are driving some of that demand, and certainly, I expect there to be some parallels to the way that maybe EPNS can be used to add value to both the DAOs and its members in terms of surfacing some of that information. I think that's really great.
[00:37:09] Jaf: I just at the personal level, I'm super excited about everything happening with the Metaverse and this is me, a very personal opinion, but I envision the Metaverse being allowing us to keep place for a lot of notifications, but I'm not talking about the notifications precisely, but about creating a very communicated world or the metaverse is also going to be really exciting already, but if you're getting notification from your smartwatch or something like, Hey, join me here. Then it's just beautiful. Everything that we can enable just because we have communication channels that will allow us to meet with our friends and do other things. I'm really, really excited at the personal level, but what the Metaverse will bring.
[00:38:00] Humpty Calderon: I think it's certainly unlocking tremendous value in some of the experiences that we already have, maybe both in the real world and in the virtual space. But there's still a lot of opportunity there. Is there anything else regarding the project that you feel we have missed about the project, let's talk about it.
[00:38:21] Jaf: Just quickly before we go, we just launched our push grants program. We allocated $1 million for a program that will run for two quarters, and that is an opportunity for everybody to join. If you have an idea of something that will help EPNS and the ecosystem in general, you know, join our discord, join our different channels that we have. There's a lot of conversation going on in our discord. We have office hours and there's always something reachable. We thankfully have people all around the world, there's always someone that you can ask your questions.
[00:38:56] Humpty Calderon: And that's a wrap. I hope you enjoy this conversation. If you'd like to learn more about EPNS, go to epns.io and on Twitter @epnsproject.
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