Redefining Notifications in Web3 Feat. Push Protocol

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I just scared all of my cats. Sorry, cats. And I'm your host, Tim, AKA Millie Yearley, AKA Hot Mike. And I am here with Harsh from Push Protocol. Welcome, sir. Welcome.

Hey, hey, Tim. Really, really excited to be here. I should also have an alias name. I was listening to your alias name and I was just wondering, it would be cool to have an alias, something to do with push. But yeah, really, really happy to be here. Let's get started.

Yeah, so Millie Yearly, that's my— that's me manifesting that we will have a million-dollar prize. It was Millie Monthly, and then somebody was like, that's too— that's too hard. Like, you know, let's get a step before that. So yeah, if we can get a million-dollar prize on PoolTogether once a year, I think we're in good shape. But yeah, what's that for Push? What's that aspirational goal that you must manifest?

Oh, sure. So not too big, just to become the de facto communication middleware for the entire Web3 and to ensure that any communication that happens, whether it's notification, whether it's chat, and maybe in the near future, even whether it's Spaces, all of it is done at a wallet level, at a native Web3 level with native Web3 token gating and Pushes powering it, but Push is invisible. So wallets and dApps, they're talking. They don't know how that's happening, but it's all getting powered by Push. So not that big.

Yeah, I don't know how to turn that into a Discord alias, but I'm sure like everybody messaging, I don't know, put Push for All, something like that. That'd be really great. So Harsh, give me how you started in crypto. How'd you even get to this wild, crazy world that just gets even wilder and crazier every week.

Awesome. Awesome. Actually, PoolTogether also has a part to play in it in the later part of the journey. I'll also come to that. So how I got started? Well, I have this decade-year— decade-old experience in mobile apps and games. And I was a successful mobile entrepreneur back in those days. But yeah, I kind of got bored because we were trying out different cool things, but I wanted to try other things as well. Like I wanted to try marketing, designing, and so many other things. This is 2010 we are talking about. And I realized that you only get to live once, right? So you need to make sure that you try everything out, especially if you're sort of doing okay. So that was the reason I started venturing out. In 2014, I was basically dabbling into various techs, tech stack, and doing all those things. And I saw this message in news in India that Bitcoin has hit $100,000 and it's one of the best investments anyone can do, right? So of course I got excited about it and I thought, why not try that out? It seems right in my foray because it's tech, tech. Didn't realize what Bitcoin was at that point. But yeah, I bought Bitcoin and after a week it went to $200. So yeah, buy high, sell low. You guys want any tips? I'm your guy. But yeah, that was actually my way into crypto because when Bitcoin crashed, I was like, I need to understand what Bitcoin is. And in that journey, I kind of found out that it's not just Bitcoin. There's so many other coins that are out there. And I also realized that whenever a coin listed on an exchange, the price kind of went up or down based on whether the exchange was good or not. So I tried to create a bot, which I now know it's an arbitrage bot, and it performed decently well till 2017, 2018, wherein it'll just map exchanges and their rate and try to do this arbitrage. But yeah, in 2017, 2018, it started picking up a lot of ERC-20 coins and this spiked my interest, like what is ERC-20 coins? And that is my foray into Ethereum. And that is actually my real foray into crypto because till then it was more like trading, right? So at that point of time, I wanted to dig deep and then I realized, oh wow, it's not just smart money, it can be programmed as well. And a lot of things flashed before my eyes. I was like, this is so cool because now you can do innovations at a pace which you cannot do with general finance or with general bank. At that point, nobody was really talking about NFTs. It was like DeFi. So I started dabbling into it and very like, and when I started dabbling into it, I went and tried a few protocols and very soon I realized that there is a sort of a broken Web3 UX it has. And this broken Web3 UX was very similar to broken Web2 UX when I was trying Web2 in 2003. in the days of Orkut and when Gmail was first launched, wherein you had to go to the website and see what is happening. And that basically led me to understand that, okay, we are very, very early and we don't even have notifications at a wallet level. To just simplify it, like protocols, we interact with each protocol via wallet. So wallet becomes our Web3 usernames. And there was no way for those Web3 usernames to know what is happening. when we, when you win a lottery on PoolTogether, you know via email, but you don't know via wallet address. And that is not right because when we are on Telegram, we talk on Telegram. When we are on Twitter, we talk on Twitter. Just by that extension, we needed a way to define communications for Web3. And that was the foray into Push. And that's why Push got started because till then no one was working on communication. And we realized that we need to build notifications for Web3 first. And then once you do that, you can so much communication stack, like messaging, how WhatsApp or Telegram does it, or even more because you can have token gating in it. And even more than that, like how we are talking on Discord, internally it's all the same communication stack. So yeah, that was how I got into crypto. Now where PoolTogether comes in. So PoolTogether came in because That was one of the concepts that blew my mind. That was around 2019, 2020. And I was like, wow, a no-loss lottery. Because coming from India, you are all like, there's this thing that you don't gamble your money, right? You need to save, save, save. And I had that thought. So I was very afraid of lending and borrowing, but I was not afraid of a zero-loss lottery. And that was basically my foray into DeFi. And then I realized That we are talking DeFi and this is so powerful with no-loss lottery that cannot exist outside of Web3 or even flash loans that cannot exist outside of Web3. And I realized that this innovation would be so much cooler if they are able to reengage the user as well and inform the user as well. And that is basically in essence how Push got born. Because notification messaging and everything Web3 is what Push wanted to do. And that happened with 2020 via ETH Global Hackathon, which is what I suggest everyone who listens to any of my podcasts to do. So yeah, long story. This is how I got into crypto.

That's great. So then how did you get connected? Like, yeah, how did then Push get started?

Sure. So Push got started in 2020. I mean, 2018, I knew about crypto. I started learning about it. I also joined a company in New York. They were doing aggregated identity just for Ethereum and meta transactions. And because I was an entrepreneur before, I knew that if I'm starting in a space, I need to first understand the space. So that was basically my 2 years. In making sure that I understand DeFi and basically understand the ins and outs. But in 2019, like the later part of 2019, I thought that I'm prepared to see if I can find a problem to solve that hasn't been solved. And that, that is what led me to the route of trying different protocols out. So I tried a lending protocol, I tried PoolTogether. I even tried governance and all of those things that I tried, it was very clear to me, like very, very soon, just because of the mobile background, that they're not communicating back to the users. So they are expecting, like even when your ENS domain is expiring, people are expected to go back and see. And then I realized that if we are talking that Web3 will replace Web2, which means that we'll interact with several dApps, like social dApp also. At that point, Lens was not there. So I was imagining, let's say, if there's a social dApp. And then I realized that any and everything that we do in Web2 is driven by communication. First notification and then messaging. For example, like what is the first thing that we do when we get up in the morning? We look at our phone and we have important notifications from all the important apps that we use. We have notifications about our important email. Even about our Slack, whatever we are doing, whenever we Venmo, PayPal something, whenever we order something from Amazon, whatever games we play, we have notifications for all of it. Even something that we do social, in social sense, like tweets we post or any message that we do on Discord. All of this is driven back to the user by making use of communication or notification to the user. Simply put, it's basically that the app communicates to the user that, hey, something of importance might have occurred to you, for you, and what you want to do. And that basically didn't exist in Web3. And I was lucky enough to realize that. And that essentially formed EPNS, Ethereum Push Notification Service, which later transformed to Push because we, because we kind of achieved what we wanted to do. We achieved the market fit. We achieved sending notifications from Web3 protocols and You know, we now are integrated with 700+ protocols, including the like of Uniswap, PoolTogether, Gitcoin, Polygon, and so much more. But yeah, that is essentially how we started Push.

So after ETHCC, there's been this— this is the first time. So I've been in crypto full-time since November 2021, though I dabbled before that. And this is really the first time that I'm seeing people who are like, don't Telegram me, not sharing my Twitter. I'm going to only connect with people at ETHCC via Web3 messaging services. And I love that energy. And so I've been doing that. Twitter just removed DMs for non-verified users. You have to both be mutually following to be able to DM somebody unless you're a verified user, and then you can DM people cold. I think that's how it goes. And so I just posted today about, hey, anybody can message me at these addresses, you know, and I gave some ENS stuff and my PoolTogether subdomain and my Wasi subdomain. And so it's been really fun to actually talk to people on this new service where I'm seeing traction, where I'm actually seeing like, like, you know, at first it's like a novel thing that's like, oh cool, we can talk to wallets. But like actually conversations are happening now. And at least for me in my experience. So I feel like this is like the summer of Web3 messaging, though, Harsh, I know for you, you're like, that's what I've been saying all along. But I feel like people are starting to be like, hey, these other systems aren't working, especially Twitter. So have you seen this growth in your service? Of course, right?

Yes, yes. So absolutely. Like, this is one of the happiest moments for me. Like, people are realizing, even other protocols are realizing that we need Web3 messaging. Like this has been something that we said from moment on that, guys, we are talking about 1 million devs. Eventually we are going to talk about 1 million users. Those users, we cannot expect them to do things differently. We need to do, or we need to build the Web3 standard for everything. And I'm very happy that this is happening, like not only for Push, but for other protocols as well. Like I'm glad that they jumped into the bandwagon because now at least we we, we can try different paths out to achieving the same thing, which is to improve the Web3 UX for the entire Web3 community. So I'm, I'm extremely happy about that. I'm extremely happy to see that growth, and I'm extremely happy to see that users are finally realizing that, hey, my wallet is not going to just tie my account data, it's going to tie my communications also. So I'll receive notifications from protocols. I will be able to chat to other wallets. Not only that, I'll be able to go into the community and start chatting without even realizing or without even proving that I have that community's, let's say, token or NFT, because I'm chatting with the wallet and there will be cryptographic proof. So those indirect things that we do, that will also start getting eliminated. And this is one thing that we talked about predictions. So this is one thing I predict that communication is going to be extremely big. in this space. More so, I would say it would be notification-driven first and then messaging-driven. But yeah, both of them are here to stay and both of them will transform the way we interact in Web3.

Well, that makes sense. Notification first, just because that's the thing that you need to engage users, right? That home screen, the lock screen is like the new frontier. And if you can get permission, For example, like with PoolTogether, if, you know, of course people are going to want notifications that they've received a prize with PoolTogether. And so that's like one way to guarantee that, like, for a wallet to send a notification to a user that you just won something, the user's not going to hide that. But once you get that notification, obviously then the user enters your app and starts using it. So I love that, that you said that the frontier is really notifications first, web messaging second. And then, I'm also noticing this new theme of asset-based communication. So, somebody's got an NFT that you want, and you want to talk to them, and you want to wheel and deal. You could also do that via wallet, for sure. But say wallet privacy starts happening and things like that, but there's an NFT that you want, you can actually send messages or do things like gated messaging based on that asset. So, if that asset transfers wallets, Future communication would go to that new wallet rather than the previous holders, which is pretty, pretty cool and a different way to think about things.

Correct. Correct. So basically like the way, I mean, Push NFT Chat is one of the reasons we launched Push NFT Chat was because of this. And now with ERC-6551 coming, we are also going to support that. But yeah, in essence, that's the way, like, I mean, there are 2 things that we are talking about, so I'm just going to break it into 2 different questions. Like one thing that we spoke about was, of course, is going to be notification first and then chat, because that's how Web2 operates. And that is how you can get re-engagement, right? If I'm messaging you and you don't get to see who messaging, or you don't get notified that who has messaged you, then there's no point in messaging because they will not return to your dApp. And they will not interact with you until, you know, 10, 15 days later they find out. So notification solves that. And that's why notification got built on Web2 first, and then came WhatsApp, and then came Apple FaceTime. And that is the same path that we followed because that is basically like, don't reinvent something that is already fixed. But there's another important thing that we have to point out. Like we are talking about communication and we have seen Telegram scams and Twitter scams and so many scams. So the way Push wanted to solve messaging was to make it very friendly for the Web3 user, but at the same time eliminate spam. And that is where user-centric approach of Push really came in handy. And I'm very happy that we invented that because we didn't have any precedence or any predecessor to follow. This is one more thing that I think will drive communication and usage more is when you make your protocol user-centric. And that is what Push does with messaging as well, wherein you can send people a message out, but unless that person accepts your chat request, your native notifications are not enabled and that chat request is kept in a different folder. Very much like Twitter. And it solves a lot of Web3 UX issues. Like it solves Web3 UX issue of spam. It also ensures that if someone is trying to spoof or if someone is trying to sell you something, that can be eliminated. And then comes the other part of the problem that you were talking about, which was more based on like, once you do notification and once you do messaging, like what is the path forward, right? Actually, I forgot the second part. Can you repeat that?

No, that's okay. Yeah, no, I was talking about asset-based communication and you had said, yeah, Harsh, then you were like, oh yeah, we have that with NFT Chat. And I'm looking at the product and I'm like, wait a second. So I'm trying to find it. Yeah.

Yeah. NFT Chat is SDK only for now because some of our partners, they wanted NFT Chat. And so we released it on the SDK first and it's going to come to the dApp. But yeah, NFT Chat. So why NFT Chat? So there is this thing that we started noticing like in the past year where people who have Azukis or let's say Bored Ape or any NFT, they basically went on and they started changing their Twitter profile. Because that was a part of their identity now. And we realized through this, this actions of the user, that identity for Web3 will not just be limited to your wallets. Identity will expand to enable things not only on your wallet level, but on your Web3 social level as well. So Push, for example, with NFT Chat supports ENS, Lens, whatever, CyberConnect, or whatever NFT that you have. But the idea was that your identity, a user will choose what they want their identity to be tied with. Like it can be a Lens account or it can be a Bored Ape or it can be a Azuki. And with NFT chat, what will happen is now that NFT is chatting to you and that becomes a part of the expanded identity of Web3. Because some of, in some of the cases you would want that. Like for example, Web3 social, you would definitely want that your NFT is tied to whatever conversations you're doing and to whatever chat history you're doing. But not only that, you also have to imagine the future, like 5 years down the future, you will transfer your NFT from one wallet to the other. There's no way that the NFT will be soul bounded. And because of that, you cannot tie an NFT to a wallet address. You need to develop different standards so that NFT chat can be enabled and they're transferable as soon as you transfer the NFT. Not only that, there should also be an option for the user to wipe that previous connections out in case they're selling it out. And that was the answer, like combining all those features gave us the answer in terms of PushNFT. Chat. And as I said, like 6551 came in and they're doing extremely well. And that is why PushNFT Chat will also support Push 6551 in the near future. But yeah, just my rant on identity and Web3 identity is going to expand.

Well, that's awesome. And that's what like PoolTogether has partnered with NameStone, which basically allows for gasless subdomains. So We have over 200 PoolTogether community members who have claimed their pooltogether.eth subdomain. So it's gasless. So you can adjust your profile. You can, you know, change, you can put some code in there if you want in the content field. Well, that's not yet, but like it could be. There's so many things that you could do with these different things. Like this new version of PoolTogether will have vault lists and it just pulls a JSON blob. It just needs to read that. And I could link that to my gasless subdomain. And so now members of the community not only can communicate with one another through Push with their subdomains, but they can also like, you know, control vault lists. And then you just pop in a username and you can see all the vault lists that Tim likes or that Darby likes, you know? So there's these really cool community-based, so it's not asset-based per se, 'cause like Wasis are doing it as well, where you have these subdomains. But I see this like, I want to collect them all, like all of my communities that I'm a part of. I would love to have my own subdomain of those, just collecting them. And then, another use is switching out wallets. A lot of times, especially if you're using an ENS address for something professional, is you might not want to tie that to a wallet, or you might want to switch that occasionally. And so, the ability to keep your digital identity the same, but then rotate out wallets, There's this like Web3 messaging, digital identity renaissance, what really needs to be on-chain, what needs to be, what can be off-chain sort of thing. And I feel like Push is right in the middle of all that. Like you've got Spaces now, right? With this new release, you've got like video messaging. You can do video calls now through Push. There's like these, you can do group messaging. It's really cool to see all the stuff that you've been able to do. What else can you do that I haven't messaged yet that you might not know about?

Sure. First of all, I'm really impressed that you're so aware. So yeah, definitely Spaces and video messaging is a part of the near future that we are thinking of. And we launched it because we want to keep on working and keep on refining it. But yeah, those are the future things that are coming. But right now, what we are really focused on and what we really think would drive the Web3 communication forward is essentially a way to gate stuff, right? For example, like having a message, like why would we expect users who are on Discord to switch to another messaging platform? One thing that we can say is that, okay, you have pseudo-anonymity and therefore it makes sense. That's perfect. But for some users it'll work, for most of the users it'll not. Again, like Web3 is very cool, but we need to learn from Web2 UX. Then the other use case that might entice user to switch to Web3 messaging is probably that, you know, you can talk with your identity, which is again very cool. Push NFT Chat basically tried to cover that. But what we are very, very excited about Is about the possibility of combining Web3 exclusive features to Web3 messaging. That is when everything becomes very, very cool. So for example, we launched groups, right? You have public group and you have private group, but we didn't stop over there. We launched NFT token gating groups and we also launched token gating groups as As a whole, what it achieves is it gives now the user these features wherein if they want to participate in PoolTogether governance, now they can go to any frontend or they can go to pooltogether.com and they just have to connect their wallet and they can start chatting. And if the group is token gated, then you need to have that amount of token to access that group. If the group is private, then that means that no one else from those people or your community is only able to check the group out. But you can make it public also, which means that people can see what is happening. But to participate in the group, they need some amount of tokens or some amount of NFT. Now, all of a sudden, it's a Web3 native use case. It's not that we are replacing Discord or we are building a clone of Discord or Telegram. Now it makes sense because you have your wallet, you have your community. In that community, when you go, there's nothing that you need to do apart from connecting your wallet to prove that you are a part of that community and you can start chatting. And we want to take this even further. Like we want to make sure that all the communities, whether it's NFT, whether it's PoolTogether, whether it's any protocol, they can define these very fine granular access for what works in their community, who's who. Whose voice they want to hear and whose voice they don't want to hear. And that when combined altogether becomes push chat. In the future, what we see is like once this thing starts picking up and protocols start using it, like how they started embracing notification and now chat to some extent, then in the future what will happen is That you will not think about doing a community call on Discord because that group will become your community. And at that point of time, Push Video and Push Spaces would be so cool because you can do a push group video call just like how we are doing a Discord call. And Push Spaces becomes a way for you to talk to other people and you can still token gate it, which is so, so cool. So you can token gate that that if you want to speak, you want to have this amount of token, or if you want to speak, you want to have this amount of NFT, or even transaction gate. Like if you want to speak, then you need to be a donor in Gitcoin. And all of those things combined makes Web3 so, so cool because Web3 features combined with Web3 native chat gives you all the different innovations which you can do with your community and which you can do to define the identity within your community. Let me know if that makes sense or I ranted way too much.

No, that's great. That's great. I also wanted to, I mean, you had talked about developers, right? So we're trying to onboard a million developers to then onboard the next million people. And I got to go to one of these hacker houses at ETHCC. And then Push was there. You were there, you were outside, I bumped into you. And then I went inside and I was next to these 2 devs and one of them goes, ooh, and then reaches down and picks up a Push cheat sheet. And I was like, oh yeah, Push. And I started like talking about Push and they actually had, they didn't know about Push. They just liked your cheat sheet and they liked that it was in color. And they just liked that as a dev, it makes their life easier. And I was just like, what a great insight because with Pull Together, we're thinking about like, we want people to build with Pull Together and how do we encourage devs to build with Pull Together? And I'm like, oh, so you need to make people's lives as easy as possible within cheat sheet screams that, right? Hey, we've taken, here's how, here are all the shortcuts. And then the other thing was it was in color and all the other cheat sheets were not in color. And so that pop, that was like, the visual thing that that person needed. And immediately they thought, oh, Push, like that was such great marketing. So anyways, congratulations on that. And I would love to see, I want to hear more about that DevRel, you know, wooing developers to build with Push.

So Tim, like I'm so, so happy you noticed that cheat sheet. Actually, Push started the concept of cheat sheet from DevConnect Amsterdam. I'm so happy that the team kind of figured out that people have internet connection, but when they are hacking, they like in Web 2, you do have a cheat sheet and people just try to figure out, okay, where do I have to go instead of Googling or going to docs and trying to find out. And that is when you know the concept of cheat sheet was thought of by Now, again, really happy that it grew so much in this space and now it's coming back. So that's, that's really exceptional. But yeah, I would say that ECC—

Real quick though, let me interrupt you. Sorry, but I went to some other table of another protocol and I asked for their cheat sheet because I like started, I wanted to compare. And they didn't have one. And I was like, oh, so I love how, like, it's, I think it's like everyone should have a cheat sheet already. And I just found out about it. And then I like shamed this protocol that didn't have one. So anyway, sorry, please continue.

Yeah, I always go to cheat sheet. Like whenever I'm, whenever I was hacking, my first go-to was that, okay, I cannot create a GitHub repo, but I know all the protocols that are going to sponsors. So let me see all the cheat sheets that can be there. And I couldn't find find one. So that was, that was kind of the thought process that stuck around. And I think the protocol can definitely learn from it. But yeah, coming, coming, coming back to like devs and 1 million devs and 1 billion users. So I was there at ETHCC and I was talking about the same subject. And, you know, I, that, that is one of the talks I really, really love. Because I can go on and on about it. There's one thing which I try to tell people that we need to realize that Ethereum and Web3 has evolved past getting developers. So 2 years ago, our goal when it was 1 million devs, it was right to not pay attention to Web3 UX because at that point of time we didn't really need Web3 UX that much. Devs basically, like all of us, we will just go and we will just try to figure things out. And I think we are paid to figure things out. So we get extra happiness even if the documentation is abstract to figure things out. But now we are talking about 1 billion users, and that is what I keep on telling people that we need to realize that 1 million devs, they do not equal 1 billion users. Users basically are actually not there for the tech. Users are there for the product. And that in essence means that the user wants a product to be very smooth. I mean, the user doesn't want to learn about the tech stack of the product or how the technology works in the product. What they want to do is they want to just go ahead and use the product out. And what they want is that once they're using the product out, the product makes their lives 10x easier. So I tell everyone that the 4 things that we probably need to focus on in the next iteration of Web3, which we are working on currently, is basically eliminating user learning. That is the first thing that we have to do, which is basically like the first time I installed MetaMask because I wanted to try a protocol out. I couldn't try that protocol for 6 hours because I was learning seed words and I was doing on and off ramp, then KYC. Sending Ethereum, and thank God that protocol didn't require me to deposit tokens. Otherwise, I had to learn about tokens as well. And that is so so scary for a user. Like a user who is earning through a job, they are coming to Web3 because they think that you know they can contribute in Web3 or get incentivized to use Web3 or do something else. And the first thing that they are thrown at is the seed words and saying that if your seed word is complex. compromised, all your Web3 account is gone. So first thing that we need to solve is account abstraction, which I'm very glad, like a lot of people are working on. The second thing which can bring us a billion users is about making sure that we improve the UI and the UX component of the dApp. A lot of the dApps right now, they basically require a user to connect a wallet before you can do anything. And there's a conundrum over here because when you start to connect a wallet, the wallet will say that, hey, are you sure you want to connect it to website? Don't connect the site that you trust. So what happens is that protocol go and they try to create signal and noise and branding so that trust can be built so that the user can come and connect a wallet and see that app. Which is such a wrong interface to be in. The best way you can do this is by learning from Web2 again. Like you go to YouTube, you are not, you are not required to sign in. You can see all the videos. It's only when a user had to do some action which will benefit them is when you have this friction of signup. Wherein in YouTube case, it's when you are uploading a video or when you want personalized recommendation. Again, things that benefit the user. That is the type of interface we have to bring to Web3 and, you know, pull together, push. Any protocol needs to bring that. Uniswap is probably the best example of solving this, wherein right now, if I want to swap in Uniswap, only when I click on swap do I have to connect my wallet. Else everything is there for the user to see and experiment on. That's the second thing that we need to solve. The third thing is that we also need to embrace AI. Which is basically not embracing AI for any tokens, but embracing AI on the things that we do. Again, a very common example of that is when I try to interact with a smart contract, that the smart contract will show me a bunch of hexadecimal things or a bunch of function calls. I don't know what that function call does. And because of that, I myself don't interact with a smart contract until I have either read about them or I believe them. Imagine this thing from a user side. The user, why would they even think of interacting with a smart contract if we say that you need to know everything? So the user doesn't need to know everything. We can leverage AI to solve some of it. Like one of the best examples I saw was when I was there at ETH India judging, and there was this project which basically created a MetaMask Snap that made sure that whatever transaction you're doing, it decompiles a smart contract and it runs it through ChatGPT, and it just displays it in a human-readable format what you're doing. That is one of the steps that we can do to eliminate so many problems of the user that the user has to learn about anything. So that is again, like the third thing that we need to do. And the fourth thing is of course communication, which Push is trying to make sure that we revolutionize the communication space for Web3 UX, because anything that we do right now in any of the virtual world just revolves around notification, messaging, talking to each other, like how we are doing and so on. So yeah, that's my take on if you want to bring up billion users, we need to do all these things.

Yeah. And I mean, design is such a huge part of this. I always go back to my example of Decentral Games. They sponsored Hustler Casino live poker games on YouTube, right? So there's like 60,000 viewers watching these. I mean, it's probably more than that now. Just watching these high rollers, and they're amateur poker players just shoving their chips. There's pro players and there's amateurs. So it's really fun to watch, but they sponsored The Veldt. And so this is this Web3 Decentraland gaming cutting-edge protocol that's advertising, trying to reach the mainstream. And I was in the chat and I was asking people what they thought about what they thought about this site, Decentral Games. And they're like, the website looks sus. It looks shady. Yeah. And it's not on Decentral Games, right? That's Web3 in general is like, it's all very dev heavy and it's very rare to see, right? Because we're building, right? We're doing minimum viable products. We're getting— but the design, that YouTube, that Google, that Meta, user UX, like decades of UX experience that go into UI and how crucial that is for the next phase of Web3. Because if anything looks shady, people think it's shady. And the other thing is, is like, if it is shady, you're protected by your credit card company. You know, you can always just dispute the charge. And that also is not the case in Web3. So, you know, sometimes abound, you know.

I mean, I'm so glad that this is the exact problem, right? That we are not protected. And on top of that, we are just trying to understand the users now. So those problems we need to fix. And then it becomes like you have innovation meets UX. So now people are like, okay, I'll use this protocol because my like get-to-know makes easier. Not Because, you know, I have to try something. Because trying something is a developer or an early adopter call. Billion users, they don't try things just because they're inquisitive. They will try when they know that their incentives or the features that a product offers is more.

And then even like if you go to make a purchase, right, which is like the holy grail of actions to get a user to make is to make a purchase. And how many times in Web3 do we not have enough gas? At least me, I'm not running around with like gas, right? I don't have gas in this wallet. And, uh, you know, and you see this in Web2 now, all these payment plan companies abound now that, oh, your credit card is declined, or, oh, you know, you don't, you can sign up for a payment plan and they're, you know, zero interest and all this. And it's, it even could be as easy as like, hey, you know, you're, you don't have gas in your wallet. Let's pull some from your bank account. But I understand regulation and everything, but they're just these, you know, it's always the we're so early mentality. But I do think like with this messaging stuff and with Push and the features that you're trailblazing, especially like group chats, like I can now on Push do my Telegram BD that I do. I have so many stinking group chats. I can now do that on Push on desktop, which is really, really great. So Harsh, as we like wrap up here, I would just love to hear what's your vision for the future? with Push and for crypto in general? Where are we going?

So vision for the future, like we basically, we basically want to become this invisible middleware. And I think we are on the right track to become that. And we want this Push, what Push wants is that all this Web3 innovations can be bought and can be transformed into communication for the user. So the user wins in the end, like the Web3 UX wins in the end. So that's the vision for the Push, for the vision or for the future of crypto. And yeah, for Push, of course, we are working on that. So we just launched V2, guys. If you guys want to check that out, that would be cool. What we have done is we have also introduced a new feature called incentivized chat requests. Which basically means that if you want to charge someone for them to talk to you, you can do that in settings now or very soon because right now the smart contract is launched so that that will come very soon. And yeah, the fee pool is live. It essentially means that whatever charges Push does at a protocol level, now that can be split between users of Push as well as the crypto wallets that that have integrated Push. But yeah, besides Push, like my future vision for crypto is I do feel that we are on the right path. Future version of crypto will keep on removing that, those boundaries that we have established in Web3, which is basically that you need a wallet and you need to sign to connect to dApp and so on. I I feel that that is going away because a lot of very cool teams are working on it. So I know that's going away. I do also feel that account abstraction is coming. Account abstraction is basically going to make sure that you can recover your wallet without needing to store your seed phrase or something else. At least I hope one of that, one of those parts will. be taken into account, abstraction. So that's something which is very cool that's going to be in. And I do feel that crypto will start going mainstream the more we start becoming invisible. So I think that is the future of crypto. Also, it'll be very interesting, like with so many L2s, like how everyone is talking or how a protocol would interact with each other. I think to that extent that everyone is going to go cross-chain or multi-chain. So yeah, that's there. And I'm really, really excited for that. Another thing before we wrap up, guys, I just wanted to say like we are doing something cool with Push. We are arranging a pan-India tour for all the developers or for all the best colleges of India. And the idea is that we are going to go over there not to tell them about Push, but we are getting the best Web3 protocols like The Graph or Polygon or ETHGlobal or Flipkart and so on. And we are basically going to individual colleges to tell them about the innovation of Web3 and how they can be a part of it. So yeah, that's also something I just wanted to announce because I'm very, very excited about it. But yeah, to answer Tim's question, Like the future of crypto is that the crypto will become invisible and people will realize less and less that we are on crypto and creator economy will become more and more as we go ahead.

Awesome. Well, Harsh, thanks so much for spending time with the PoolTogether community. Really excited about my group chats going. That's crazy that you can like charge people to talk to you. But I guess, you know, that I could see that really working well in the BD world of like, you know, you know, just like, do you really, are you really gonna, you know, do you really need to make this conversation right now or is this free for you? You know, so that's, that's a really interesting concept and look forward to just continuing to work together. This is great. Thanks so much.

Thanks so much, Tim. Had great fun to be here. And yeah, love that you're using GroupChat and that We are getting Web3 into the mainstream.

Okay, cool. Thanks. That was great.

Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.