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Push Protocol
· 23 min read

Our 2021 Year in Review 🎉🎉🎉

Cover Image of Our 2021 Year in Review 🎉🎉🎉

2021 was an epic year for EPNS. And not just us, for the entire crypto space. It was the year when the world finally opened up to crypto, blockchain, DeFi, and all their use cases. Along with the fundamental changes also arrived the age of L2 scaling and NFTs, pushing blockchain and crypto further into the mainstream.

Alongside all the massive developments that the crypto space accomplished altogether, EPNS too has been growing at a rapid pace. From our Token Generation Event giving birth to our native token $PUSH to hitting important milestones, to say 2021 was a thrilling year would be a massive understatement. Some major milestones we reached include protocol audit, Community Incentives Programs, the EPNS Governance launch, community growth with EPNS Rockstars, mobile app launch, SDKs, the EPNS browser extension release, and project collaborations with some of the most renowned protocols in the space!

That being said, it wouldn’t have been possible without our super supportive community that kept pushing us for the best in us. We are humbled by the love and support that we have received from the EPNS and wider Ethereum community. We love you all. A HUGE Kudos to the EPNS team as well for working tirelessly day in and day out to make EPNS the truly robust, reliant, and decentralized communication protocol for Web3.

Welcome to the EPNS 2021 Rewind, where we summarize our journey and highlights in the past year, reminiscing how much we’ve grown as a project.

🌟 And then it Began — The $PUSH Token Genesis 🌟​

  • Token Generation Event
  • Liquidity mining
  • Airdrop to our early adopters and community members

As the year kicked off, EPNS took huge steps. It all started with a genesis — the Token Generation Event of $PUSH. It was no mean feat! It was the culmination of months of hard work combined with thorough discussions and feedback from members of the community, advisors and investors regarding the overall tokenomics of $PUSH. The token generation was followed by the initiation of the Liquidity Rewards Program. The Rewards program launched with two pools: The PUSH Staking Pool and the Uniswap LP Pool, allowing users to participate in yield farming and liquidity mining opportunities with $PUSH.

Over the months that followed the TGE, $PUSH got listed on highly popular crypto exchanges like Huobi, KuCoin, Uniswap, ParaSwap, WazirX, MEXC, ZebPay, Gate.io, Bitbns.

This truly was an exciting time for the team, and so was it for the community as it marked the beginning of EPNS’s push (pun totally intended) to become the world’s first decentralized notifications & Web3 communication protocol.

🌟 Frens Coming Together 🌟​

As we built the world’s first decentralized web3 notifications and communications protocol, we realized that it was time to put EPNS to heavy testing and start onboarding more participants to the protocol! So, we partnered with numerous decentralized protocols to start working with them as part of our pilot program and implementing channels for their various use cases. The pilot program gradually grew into something we did not imagine. By the end of 2021, we were working with a number of household DeFi and Web3 projects joining the list. We are super excited to be able to integrate EPNS with our fellow partners and thrilled to be working with some of the best minds in the industry and bringing push notifications for their users.

Below are all the protocols and projects we are working with for our pilot program — Uniswap | Alpha Homora | Polygon (previously MATIC) | Gitcoin | AAVE | ENS | Unstoppable Domains | Biconomy | Superfluid | Oasis.app | PoolTogether | Yam Finance | Mask.io | Ceramic | Frontier | bZx | CLR.fund | UniLend Finance | Charged Particle | GnosisDAO’s SafeSnap | PlotX | Boardroom| B.Protocol | Symphony Finance

🌟 Following the Roadmap: Building the Tech! 🌟​

As the EPNS community grew and flourished over the year, so did our tech! Building a community is one thing, building the tech to deliver our promise for a decentralized web3 notifications protocol is another. In the past months, we’ve followed our Roadmap carefully and executed sequentially to eventually lead up to our soon-to-come Mainnet launch!

First Image of Our 2021 Year in Review 🎉🎉🎉

In Q1, while our main focus was to get prepared and successfully complete our Smart Contracts Audit and everything surrounding the Token Generation Event, we also made great improvements in our frontends and worked on providing tooling for developers to start experimenting with the protocol. By the end of Q1, we ended up by successfully launching our token together with our incentives website and our ROCKSTARS of EPNS NFTs initiative for the community to participate.

During Q2, a lot of our efforts were towards establishing collaborations with some of the most important protocols in the space. We started working on our strategic pilot partnerships and collabs with some of the major Defi protocols and communities in the ecosystem, these include Uniswap, AAVE, Alpha Homora, TrueFi, Gitcoin, Polygon, Superfluid, Biconomy, and much much more!

Q2 also saw the release of the EPNS browser extension (allowing you to receive notifications on your browser as well), SDK Beta v1.0 releases for the Showrunners SDK & Backend SDKs with example dApps for you developers to test us out!

Q3 saw MAJOR leaps and changes in how EPNS is designed and progressed as a protocol. It was time that EPNS looked to be future-proof and ready for a multi-chain world. The EPNS Protocol was now divided into EPNS Core Protocol and EPNS Communicator Protocol. The Core protocol is deployed only on Ethereum while the Communicator Protocol would be deployed on multiple chains, allowing for multi-chain functionality. Going multi-chain also meant that we needed to change how user incentives were designed, the details of which you can read here.

Q3 also included the official launch of EPNS Governance, marking the first step to progressively decentralizing the EPNS Protocol among $PUSH holders.

Further, the Protocol contracts were also audited by Chainsafe during this Q3!

We were also able to achieve the launch of the alpha of PUSH Nodes which would enable communication across Ethereum, L2s, and even other EVM and non-EVM L1s!

It was in the same quarter that we also started working on EPIPs (Ethereum Push Improvement Proposals) as a means to allow users to propose changes to and vote on proposals related to EPNS.

As the year started coming to a close in Q4, our complete focus shifted on preparing EPNS for its upcoming Mainnet launch in early January 2022.

This quarter saw us adding some much needed protocol feature updates such as a spam box for indirect subscriptions, delegation of channel controls, and verification badges on frontend. Along with this came our successful implementation of meta transactions for “subscribe/unsubscribe” actions, as well as for sending notifications themselves! This represents a huge step forward in terms of user experience as users wanting to opt-in to receive notifications will now just need to sign an off-chain transaction.

The staging environment, PUSH Mobile App and PUSH Nodes were migrated to Kovan Testnet, allowing us to ensure that our migration scripts are rock solid, and assuring us that we were taking all the necessary precautions in our preparation for the big day!

2021 was a busy year, and we’re proud to have achieved the vast majority of our product and community milestones. To always remain transparent, it’s important to note that the third party mobile SDK, P2P Push Nodes incentives, and Ceramic DID integration milestones were postponed so we could prioritize making EPNS multi-chain compatible ahead of mainnet launch. In our upcoming 2022 Roadmap, we are brainstorming the best implementation cycle for these features.

🌟 Rocking the world with EPNS Rockstars 🌟​

  • NFTs and Rockstars
  • Community contributions: from beautiful artwork, development guides, articles and more! At EPNS, we realized that we are nothing without the backing of our wonderful community. In order to show our gratitude to our most passionate and vibrant supporters, we launched the EPNS ROCKSTARS NFT Collection. Every week, a member from the community is chosen (currently via Governance) to be awarded that week’s ROCKSTAR NFT and by extension be crowned as that week’s EPNS Rockstar! And that’s not all, every ROCKSTAR receives a bag of 2400 $PUSH along with their prestigious NFT!

Over the course of this year we have chosen 35 EPNS Rockstars, and we are at a loss for words for the sheer dedication, love, and support this community has shown us while participating in this program!

Second Image of Our 2021 Year in Review 🎉🎉🎉

From community education through articles, development guides, and simple explainers, to EPNS-themed artworks, memes, and videos; this community showed us that they really are our Rockstars!

🌟 Power to the People — Governance Launch 🌟​

In September, we launched EPNS Governance, as a push for progressive decentralization of the EPNS protocol among the community. It was time for the $PUSH community to take charge by delegating their votes! The Governance framework launched with three ways for the community to vote and be involved: 1) Weekly Rockstar NFT, 2) Grants Program and 3) Metagovernance.

The Governance framework laid out the rules, processes, and roles of governance by the community during Phase 0 of the progressive decentralization plan for EPNS. This ensured that there was a clear groundwork for the community to coordinate to make better decisions. In the first iteration of the governance mechanism we use Snapshot, a multi-chain gasless client for decentralized voting. 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.

Over the past few months, we saw a steady increase in the number of participants and delegates in governance. The governance forum has been gaining traction to propose and discuss proposals. The increasing involvement of community members within the forum’s General Discussion, and also during the Snapshot voting of the weekly EPNS Rockstar has helped us slowly achieve the progressive decentralization we aimed for when we launched the EPNS Governance.

Learn more about how EPNS Governance works here.

🌟 Giving Back through Retroactive Public Goods Funding 🌟​

What started as a small but ambitious project in Gitcoin Grants Round 7 ended up as a top 5 project in the round with 210 contributors, and has grown today to be a sponsor for the past two Grants Rounds this year!

So, now, with all the love and support we’ve been receiving from you amazing folks in our community. it was time for us to give back to the Web3 community by sponsoring Gitcoin Grants Rounds 11, & 12!

🌟 Conferences, Talks, AMAs…Events Galore!!! 🌟

2021 had no shortage of events within the crypto and web3 community. As the world slowly started opening up in the latter half of the year, so did the emergence of in-person events and talks. We were glad to be a part of some of the most prestigious summits and conferences this year. Hold on, this one’s going to a long list.

AMAs

  • Satoshi Club AMA
  • Polkastarter
  • WazirX
  • EPNS Community AMA
  • TheLAO Community AMA
  • Coin Crunch India AMA and more!

Conferences, Summits, and Talks

Podcasts

EPNS Featured

EPNS Blog Posts

Our Community, our heartbeat

We would have never been anything without the awesome Web3 and PUSH community backing us. The love you shower us with keeps us up and running! At the end of the day, what we are building is an infrastructure for you the community to find value in, and simplify your web3 experience. Thank you for all the love you’ve shown us this past year! You are the real heartbeat of EPNS. our Rockstars!

Rockstars of Ethereum

We had an awesome time with some really amazing people who have rocked our community. We shared the space with

Coming 🔜 Season -2

Our Community meanwhile saw some amazing growth as well

  • Twitter Reached 100K + followers
  • Telegram Reached 50K + members

🌟 Wrapping it up for 2021 & Looking forward to 2022 🌟​

  • What are the plans?
  • Starting the year with our Mainnet Launch on 11th January 2022

Bidding adieu to 2021, we now have a new year to look forward to. The past year was an inspiring one with EPNS accomplishing and expanding beyond imagination. We worked hard to ensure EPNS is cross-chain ready! And we even had the opportunity to put a POC ready during the Solana Breakpoint event! We expanded our team and integrated with multiple major protocols and projects within the ecosystem, and continue to have the backing of the most amazing community we’ve seen!

2022 marks a new beginning, it’s now time for EPNS to go big. We have big plans for the upcoming year — Mainnet launch, grants program and more!

The EPNS mainnet launches on January 11, 2022. With it, applications across Web3 will begin exploring what it means to communicate with each other and with their users in a decentralized, permissionless, and incentivized way.

With the launch of our mainnet, businesses, service providers, and dApps in Web3 will officially be able to create channels to communicate with their own communities. The utilities are nearly limitless. DeFi applications can set up notifications that are triggered with on-chain information like loan liquidations and governance proposals. Good samaritans can set up channels to notify their subscribers about airdrops, or when suspicious activity could portent security issues. Centralized exchanges can notify people when new tokens are launched. All of this happens with just a click of a button, putting so much more power into the hands of the everyday Web3 user.

It’s an ambitious year to look forward. But as all good things, we move…forward.

Let’s #PUSH for Web3 Notifs, and Have a rocking 2022 💖💖💖

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About Push Protocol
Push is the communication protocol of web3. Push protocol enables cross-chain notifications and messaging for dapps, wallets, and services tied to wallet addresses in an open, gasless, and platform-agnostic fashion. The open communication layer allows any crypto wallet / frontend to tap into the network and get the communication across.
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