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The Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS)—a decentralized protocol for notifications on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android and web browsers like Chrome and Firefox—has raised $10.1 million in a Series A funding round led by Jump Crypto.
Other investors participating in EPNS’s latest funding round include Tiger Global, ParaFi, Polygon Studios, Harmony Foundation, Wave Capital, and angel investors such as 1inch Exchange co-founder Anton Bukov.
This brings EPNS, which launched on the Ethereum mainnet back in January, to a new valuation of $131 million. EPNS says it will use the funding to expand its development team and continue building out its product.
The EPNS is designed to deliver notifications from Web3 platforms, both on-chain and off-chain, to subscribing users. Once subscribed to selected notifications, users can receive pings regarding things like crypto price changes, completed DeFi trades, expiring Ethereum Name Service (ENS) subscriptions, NFT price fluctuations, or NFT bidding updates, for example.
PUSH, EPNS’s governance token, allows holders to vote on future protocol decisions and participate in staking.
Since launch, EPNS has sent more than 4 million push notifications to over 44,000 subscribers, according to the company's own calculations. EPNS is platform-agnostic, but is currently working with Uniswap, Decentraland, MakerDAO, and Polygon, to name a few. It has the ambitious goal of becoming the main communication layer for Web3.
The EPNS protocol is designed to be more secure than Web2 communication channels like Twitter, Discord, and Telegram, all of which support push notifications but have faced an onslaught of scammers and hackers posing as developers, NFT collection founders, or employees of Web3 companies seeking to separate users from their crypto assets.
EPNS’s funding news comes as other platforms like Metalink, which requires crypto wallet connectivity in order to chat, also look to provide Web3 solutions to the cryptocurrency space’s ongoing security and communication challenges.