We’re proud to announce that EPNS has raised $10.1 million to continue building out the communication infrastructure for the decentralized future.
Today, we’re proud to announce that EPNS has raised a $10.1 million Series A funding round, with an average valuation of $131M. Jump Crypto led the round, with additional participation from Tiger Global, ParaFi, A.Capital, Sino Global Capital, Polygon Studios, Harmony Foundation, Wintermute, Zee Prime Capital, Woodstock, DCX Ventures, Alpha Wave Capital, Zebpay, TRGC, Signum Capital and iSeedVC. The Series A also included investments from Web3 leaders Andrew Keys of DARMA Capital, David Silverman of Aave Companies, Ajit Tripathi, Kane Warwick, Jordan Momtazi and Justin Moses of Synthetix, Aniket Jindal of Biconomy, Anton Bukov of 1inch, Sahil Dewan of Harmony, Mateo a Levy, Jerome de Tychey of Cometh and Ethereum France, Sam of Journal du Coin. The Series A round comes with either a 9 to 12 months cliff for each investor along with 24 months to 30 months vesting.
We will use the funding from the Series A to expand the team, grow the user base, and develop beyond the Ethereum ecosystem to stay true to the vision of a multi-chain, interoperable decentralized future. With a robust team, tech implementation and resources, EPNS will keep perfecting the protocol, building wallet to wallet communication in Web3, and enabling developers and wallets alike to integrate the protocol in the smoothest way possible.
What an incredible milestone for EPNS — and so much of it is thanks to the support, engagement, and excitement of the community. You’ve been with us from our earliest days of hackathons and grants to our token generation event, our seed funding announcement, mainnet launch, and now Series A. We’re excited for what lies ahead, and we want to welcome you to join this next phase of the EPNS protocol and the improvement of Web3.
If you’re new to EPNS, here’s a quick rundown of why we’re here. As the blockchain ecosystem has evolved into a composable, multi-chain network, native Web3 communication is growing more and more necessary for user experience, developer operations, investor security, protocol architecture, and a lot more. Today’s methods of communication between and among Web3 users and companies — dominated by Twitter, Discord, and Telegram — give rise to poor UX, scams, and suboptimal communication. Among some of the most pressing issues: smart contract version releases are missed, liquidation thresholds are not warned, NFT drops are forgotten, and vulnerabilities aren’t communicated well. The result is a fractured and siloed approach towards communication in the blockchain ecosystem, making room for an optimized, Web3-native solution.
Starting with Ethereum and growing to other networks, EPNS is building the native Web3 communication protocol to enable users to speak to one another on-chain. EPNS enables permissionless channel notification and channel subscription along two categories of users: Channels (individuals or companies that wish to issue communication) and Subscribers (individuals that opt-in to receive communication). Currently, EPNS is powering on-chain notifications for ENS (domain expiration), CoinDesk (media alerts), Snapshot (governance updates), Oasis (vault liquidation), and more. Since mainnet launch in mid-January, EPNS has powered 4 million notifications sent to over 44,000 subscribers. EPNS is working with over 80 projects including the likes of Uniswap, Decentraland, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Polygon, ENS, dYdX, Bancor, Defiant, Coindesk, Aragon, Notional Finance, mStable, Snapshot and more!
What’s the token design / economics?
The v1 $PUSH token economics can be found here. The token design will evolve to also include v2 contract features (including wallet to wallet chat), more info on those here.
What’s the token allocation and how does this affect the community?
TLDR; the raise doesn’t affect the $PUSH community allocation, which is 53%. You can read about the token allocation model here.
The new raise comes from carving unlocked allocation out from the Foundation, from advisors, and from Founders who have agreed to return their soon-to-be-uncliffed tokens for the benefit of the protocol. Furthermore, The tokens are cliffed and vested for each investor so the token allocation model improves as the unlocked supply gets locked again.
What are the terms for Series A investors?
While we cannot disclose the exact terms, all series A investors have a cliff of either 9 or 12 months and are vested for 24 to 30 months.
Why is the raise needed?
This raise was extremely strategic for the EPNS protocol, as this marks the journey to go to multichain and replicate the traction and love we got from launching on Ethereum. The next step in this multichain journey is Polygon, followed shortly by Binance and Harmony. We would also be eying a non-EVM blockchain to come to within this year, #WAGMITOGETHER