Harsh Rajat, Co-Founder of Push Protocol, on Creating a Web3 Communication Network, and AI | Ep. 236
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Harsh Rajat, Co-Founder & Project Lead of Push Protocol, talks about centralized communication platforms, native communication between wallets, and creating a web3 communication network.
About Harsh Rajat
Harsh is the Co-Founder and Project Lead of Push Protocol (formerly EPNS). He has over 12 years of entrepreneurial experience in various spectrums of tech, including system architecture, development, and design in different tech fields (including mobile, web services, SaaS, and blockchain).
Harsh previously spoke/judged at multiple tech conferences and hackathons, including Messari Mainnet, ETHCC, ETHDenver, Schelling Point, ETHAmsterdam, NFT NYC, Liscon, HackMoney, EDCON.
Harsh Rajat gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Push Protocol is a web3 communication network, enabling cross-chain notifications and messaging for dapps, wallets, and services.
- Push powers communication for over 450 of the world’s leading dapps and service providers across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, dev tools, and more
- Native communication between wallets
- Wallet-to-wallet messaging
- Cross-chain notifications
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always and my guest today is coming back on for round two on the show after a huge knockout on round uno, which was probably about nine months ago, back when the company was called EPNS. Now Harsh Rajat, the Co-Founder and Project Lead, is back with the new name of Push Protocol. It was always sort of Push Protocol. On the front facing end, it was EPNS. Now on the front facing end, it is Push Protocol. Harsh has over ten years, twelve years exactly, of entrepreneurial experience in various spectrums of tech, including system architecture, development and design in different tech fields like mobile web services SaaS and Blockchain. Harsh previously spoke and judged at multiple tech conferences and hackathons including Masari Mainnet, ETHCC, ETHDenver, Schelling Point, ETHAmsterdam, NFT NYC, Liscon, HackMoney and EDCON. Super pumped to have this lad back on for round two it’s been a minute. Harsh, welcome back my friend excited to have you on.
Harsh Rajat
Excited to be back, Matt. This was one of the most fun podcasts I had, so I was looking forward to it. And yeah, what better time to have the podcast than now. We have so many cool things that are coming up and, yeah, we rebranded from EPNS to Push. We were always Push Protocol because we were doing notifications, but then we went into chat as well and we are launching video as well, even the protocol level Video SDK and the Protocol level Chat SDK. So, yeah, it just made sense to kind of drop Push notification service from the name. So you basically drop the notification service from the name and then because we are going for the entire Web3, which means Push will be available everywhere and will be compatible with all the blockchains, including even Bitcoin in the future. So it just made sense to drop Ethereum. All we were left with was Push. Unfortunately, push.org was available, so Push became the plan.
Matt Zahab
Did you guys try to get push.org? How much would that have been? That’s got to be, what, close to a mil?
Harsh Rajat
It was very expensive, but we got lucky. We essentially had these trackers to make sure that if the domain expires and no one is renewing it, we can grab it. I think it was destiny because we got it a lot cheaper than we expected. So yeah.
Matt Zahab
Wow. That’s a pretty domain right there. I feel like push.com would also be a pretty penny. Did you snag that one?
Harsh Rajat
No. It was very costly to get push.org, fortunately we got that. We were like, okay, done.
Matt Zahab
Good old four letter domains. Well, look, it’s lovely to have you back on Harsh. I think a good starting place would be give me the lowdown on why exactly you guys sort of changed everything. I know you briefly spoke about dropping the Ethereum Push notification service, which was the previous name. Now you’re just Push last time when we had you on, you and the team. I know you and I were talking before and after the show that this was part of the plan, and obviously you guys executed on that plan. Kudos. There’s never a doubt in my mind that you would. But nonetheless, why change from being a more specifically Push Notification service to now almost a 360 degree chat and communication app for Web3? Why the pivot? And walk me through the steps that you guys had to go through in order to execute this pivot.
Harsh Rajat
Sure. I mean, the plan was from 2020 itself, that communication is a very primitive tool which has so many facets to it. For example, do you have chats, as you said? You have video call, you have audio call. Even Twitter spaces is a form of communication. So we knew from the very start that we want to capture the entire communication era because we kind of invented notifications for Web3. But at that point of time it just made so much sense to name it in the exact form because that was a new thing that was getting rolled out in Web3 notifications were not there. So because of that and because we started from Ethereum and because of Ethereum committee we were there, we kind of thought it would be great to name it Ethereum Push Notification Service. But two years passed by and Push basically or Push Notifications basically got the network effect. We have sent over 38 million notifications to over 85,000 subscribers and we have more than 700 plus integrations, including Uniswap, AVE, Bitcoin and all the Good protocols. So it just made sense now that people understand notifications and people kind of understand them part of notification. So it made sense to basically rebrand to the vision that was there from the start, which was to create the communication middleware for the entire Web3. And because of that, notification in the name didn’t really suffice. People should know that Push is not just notification, it’s about messaging as well. It’s even about NFT messaging, which we are launching as well. It’s about video call as well and so much more. Like we planned this entire roadmap out, so we knew that notification had to go. Of course, Ethereum, we love it. Ethereum and Push started from Ethereum. But because we were going to other chains as well, for example, we launched also on Polygon and Binance. It made sense for developers and user to understand that it is just not tanked to Ethereum. It’s a blockchain agnostic protocol which is why we had to let Ethereum go, eliminating all those words, only Push remained. That is why Push became Push.
Matt Zahab
I love that. You guys have launched just a crazy amount of features. I know, obviously the bread and butter is Push Chat, but the thing that I find most interesting is one of the biggest ethos of crypto is decentralization and privacy, and there still isn’t a social network. It really allows you to be fully private. Yes. You have signal? But again, I know there’s been some rumblings over the last half year, more specifically, I guess most of 2023, about how supposedly there’s a backdoor in Signal. Again, I didn’t go deep into the article or articles, so I’m just a fly in the wall here. I’m sort of a scam artist and just read the title like most of us. But this Push Chat allows people to chat wallet to wallet. It’s truly wallet to wallet messaging. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but I could be chatting to you via Push Chat and you would just see my wallet name. You wouldn’t get any of my personal info or not even a name or anything like that. Right?
Harsh Rajat
So Push Chat is essentially purely wallet to wallet and now NFT to NFT as well. We also crack the way to do NFT communication just right. The way we encrypt it. It’s purely encrypted, like peer to peer and encrypted. The way it happens is that instead of using one encryption, Push essentially split the encryption into two phases. The first is something called a PGP key, which the user generates locally. And that PGP key is what encrypts and decrypts all the messages that you send through Push Chat. And then this PGP key in itself is encrypted by the Wallet cryptography, which means that no one other than you can decrypt those PGP keys. And because of that, no one other than you can decrypt your messages. And all of it happens in the user’s computer or in the local machine. So Push doesn’t really have to do anything or Push doesn’t have to play any central role. After that these messages, they are basically stored on Push nodes and also pinned on IPFS, making sure that the decentralized ethos are followed. Even when we are in the phases of decentralizing it more and more IPFS kind of takes on that burden of decentralization and Push node kind of takes care of making sure that the scalability and the speed matches the Web2 level. And then because we had notifications already so because of that, whenever some wallet messages you now, you also get a notification back to your wallet. So it’s just like a WhatsApp experience but for Web3, without your profile info, without doxing any security or any credentials anywhere. And people can just go on app.push.org and test it out right now. Like they just need to sign in with their wallet so we don’t ask for any personal info. So there’s no way we can store that.
Matt Zahab
So you just jump on, sign in with your MetaMask and no fees as well. That’s another thing that I found quite intriguing and interesting. But then again, this is no different than WhatsApp, which if it was a standalone company, would be I want to say there’s some crazy stat like it’d be a top, it’d be a Fortune 250 company. Like, just WhatsApp? Obviously Facebook owns WhatsApp. So how do you guys make money then? And again, I hate to be the dick journalist here and get into the nitty gritty questions, but you guys are never charging users any money and I doubt that will change. And you guys aren’t sharing people’s data. I mean, you don’t really have access to their data. Is this just a good old through and through Robin Hood? Not the Robin Hood greasy trading app, but Robin Hood, the hero with the cape. Is this a Robin Hood move here?
Harsh Rajat
Yeah. So Matt, I guess I said it before also, you can be a good VC as well. Because the type of questions. They’re very insightful as well. So, yeah, Push, the way we follow like we have the CTOs that the Web2 UX that we have that needs to be ported to Web3 UX because innovation is already there but Web3 UX and the payrolling never works. For example, like when we are using Gmail or when we are using YouTube, we use it for free. It’s only when we are trying to have extra feature that we have to pay for program also does it like that. So Push Chat is also built on the same concept. So messaging will always be free because it needs to be frictionless and because people don’t need to worry about paying for trying a service. Like they should try it if they like it, then they will get more and after that some people might opt into these premium features of Push that will come in.
Matt Zahab
It’s got to be cool, right? Nothing will ever hit critical mass. Whether it’s a physical product, piece of software. Nothing in life ever pops off unless it’s cool. Are you having fun? Are we having fun? Is it cool? What’s that the famous line from the Social Network. Remember when it Justin Timberlake, Sean Parker, he’s like, is it cool though? Right? It’s so true with everything in life, it’s got to be cool. And free is cool.
Harsh Rajat
Yeah, free is cool. That’s how we are keeping it as well. So there will be some premium features that we will charge the users, but those are the things which the user doesn’t really have to have. Think about it, Telegram premium, right? So you might have custom stickers or you might want to send payments to someone in the future with AI capabilities or something like that. We have planned like a list of features that we are going to roll out. So only those features will be charged a fee. And with Push Protocol V2, which is also launching, so a lot of products are launching, but with Push Protocol V2, the fee protocol or the fee pool is finally getting enabled. Which means like these fees that we will charge to premium users as well, these fees doesn’t go to Push itself, it just goes into the protocol. And then the token holders, they decide what part of the fee goes to all the crypto wallets or all the crypto dApp that have already integrated Push what fees goes to them. And because of that, we feel that the game theory is more circular, wherein people who are super users of Push, they pay and because people are paying so it acts like an incentive to attract all the dApps and all the wallets to adopt.
Matt Zahab
I love that and it makes so much sense, just you’re creating more skin in the game for all the users, making everyone a little more involved. Like again, like anything else in life, incentives, such a big powerful word. Crazy.
Harsh Rajat
I think if you think about it, Web2 had those incentives, but Web3 kind of takes it or kind of does it so much better because Web3 kind of flips it that the users get those incentives, right? So if you’re a user using the product, the product benefits, therefore the user should benefit as well.
Matt Zahab
So true. Harsh we’re going to take a quick break and give an early and massive shout out to our sponsor of the show. That’s PrimeXBT longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the podcast. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. Doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and for professional trading conditions and services to all of their customers. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 to take advantage of this offer and receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to take advantage of this offer. And now back to the show with Harsh. Harsh on our last pod, you and I talked about AI, and I believe that I asked you when sort of AI would pop off. Mind you, this was Q3 or Q4 of last year, right? So this is right when ChatGPT sort of came into fruition and then it really popped off four or five months ago, early 2023. You guys have also integrated ChatGPT into the Push Chat app, which is so cool, and to my knowledge, and correct me if I’m wrong, I believe this was the first time that ChatGPT was integrated into a Web3 tool. This was incredibly cool. I’d love for the full walkthrough on how you and the team integrated this and what capabilities it has given to the Push Chat app.
Harsh Rajat
Sure. First of all, like, it’s already integrated, so people, if they want to chat with the AIE version of Push, they just have to go to app.push.org/chat/pushai.eth and start chatting. We spoke about this like I’m so bullish on the AI. I see AI solving a lot of things. In a way it’s already solving a lot of problems when it comes to personalization. And that is what we thought when we launched Push Chat. We thought it would be so cool if we can just get this AI incorporated in phases. And this is just a phase one. So what we did was we basically give this AI chat bot a very sassy personality. So it’s very sarcastic, it’s very sassy, just fun to talk with. That’s the first step, just to make sure that people can talk with the AI and be very comfortable. But we are not stopping over there.
Matt Zahab
How did you make it sassy? Again, this is way above my pay grade here. On the actual integration and back end side, how do you rig or program your ChatGPT bot to have a level of sas to it.
Harsh Rajat
Cool. You have these prompts, right? So one way to make it sassy is give it a very long prompt when it initializes and give it all the qualities or the personality which you want it to have. The other is training data as well. Like you can have some sort of training data that you can utilize as a prompt which will basically initialize it to have a very sassy behavior. Like ChatGPT is very cool in that way. You can basically do prompt tricking to make ChatGPT a different personality and then if you provide training data as well, then that personality sticks and that is what we have done. But even if you’re trying ChatGPT on the Web2 version like just Google ChatGPT jailbreaks, you have so many personalities that you can play with. They will not be as intricate as what we designed because of course we took some time to do the training data but you can try it out and you can make it do whatever you want. There’s ChatGPT jailbreak as well in case you want to look into it on how to break the restriction ChatGPT has. So it’s very cool thing that has come in and I mean it’s also something that we all need to try, right? We just need to understand how things operate over there but yeah, coming back to the Push AI and phase wise thing so we broke it into phases. What we envision is or the final phase of what we envision is a place where people are chatting and people basically then just ask the AI that buy me it when it drops below X amount of price or give me the best lending protocol or imagine you are going to any protocol. And because you are connected to your wallet and because this has ChatGPT or Push AI built into it, it can also understand how much of a super user you are or you are not. And through a chat bot it can guide you for the entire interface. Right? So you don’t have to read any tutorials, you don’t have to do any YouTube, you can just ask and based on your onchain history it can also tell you exactly what you want to do in the shortest summarized form possible. So that is one thing that we are aiming for. The second is that you can chat and you can do so many things in like you can chat and tell the AI that find me the best NFT based on my collection and it can find you the best NFT or buy me this NFT when the NFT price goes under a certain value. So a lot of cool things can be made possible with that. And you have to imagine it with the way native english Web3 users operate and even non native Web3 users. So non native english speaking Web3 user Push AI would be really huge because you can ask in your language like what do you want to do or how do you want to do it? And you don’t have to learn interface, thereby easing the Web3 UX, which I briefly spoke about when we started. So we are very excited about Push AI in a way it has possibility to improve Web3 UX a lot, both in terms of people understanding protocols when they go to those sites, and also people asking AI to take away the manual burden of searching something on OpenSea or doing some trades because all of that can be done.
Matt Zahab
Interesting. Wow. Going back to just ChatGPT as a whole for a second, or just AI as a whole, what areas of AI excite you the most? And I guess a quick follow up to that would just be on the dev side of things. As someone who’s not a developer, I’ve screwed around with making websites and they’re still terrible, but for the first time ever, I created some pretty shit websites without a no code tool. Well, ChatGPT is technically a no code tool, but me literally just copy and pasting the code into my web browser, which is, well, not the web browser, but the back end, which is pretty interesting and incredibly cool, and it saved me thousands of dollars. Normally, I need to hire someone like you or one of the brilliant web devs from your team in order to crank out a website for me. Now, someone who has no coding experience can literally use ChatGPT and get beautiful, concise, efficient code and throw that on. So really, just what areas of AI, more specifically ChatGPT excite you and your team the most? And how are you guys using ChatGPT to sort of speed up your coding efforts?
Harsh Rajat
Sure, yeah, this can be a podcast in itself, mad. So many things about AI, but yeah, the thing that excites me the most, it’s AGI or general intelligence. I think we are inching closer to that, which will be very cool to see.
Matt Zahab
Just for the listeners, can you give it a quick primer on AGI? And then before actually we get into what you’re going to say next, let’s just buzz on this topic for a little, because this is something that excites the shit out of me as well. So, the floor is yours. Give us a quick primer on what exactly AGI is, future use cases, and of course the Elephant in the Room, how it can be incredibly scary and potentially world ending.
Harsh Rajat
Awesome. So right now, the AI that we had, or I mean even right now with ChatGPT, also like the AI that we have, we basically train them to do specific things. Like, for example, there is a version of ChatGPT which is DALL-E, done by the same company, and that creates images. But ChatGPT cannot create images. It doesn’t understand how to create images, because till this point, we have essentially focused on training the AI on certain things. That’s how it has worked. So, if you want the AI to draw really good images, you need to give the AI millions of images or feed the data to the AI. That’s why when you go to ChatGPT, it says that the data is limited till September 2021, because that is the data that ChatGPT was trained up. So when we speak of AI, we basically speak of specific AI. ChatGPT is very good in understanding human language with and then answering in a very cool human way. But there are certain complex tasks that ChatGPT fails to do, even right now, even for example, like some basic math GPT-3.5 wasn’t able to do, because that is not the job of the AI the AI was trained to understand and act like a human. And then this DALL-E AI was there to understand what the human meant and produce image. So all of these things were basically different segments, and that is what AI has been till now. But we are also moving in a direction where AI will become AGI, which is general intelligence. So, just like you and me, no matter how bad we draw, if someone asks us to draw, we can still draw something. And if someone asks us to communicate, we can communicate. If someone asks us to code, no matter how good or bad we are, we can still code. That is what AGI is about. It’s about understanding all the things and even learning more and more about it. So, in a way, it’s consciousness, but people can of course, there’s so many ethical theories around it, so let’s not go to consciousness, but let’s stick to the way that in a way, it’s an AI that can learn and perform any task that you want it to do. Now, coming to the scary part, so this is like a moral and ethical question, and I usually talk about this a lot or think about this a lot. So there’s two scenarios over here, right? One is Matt, like you don’t need a website developer now. So of course, with AI becoming AGI, more and more, all these jobs will go away. So one theory is that if all these jobs go away, then in the future either you need to have a universal basic income, because otherwise most of the population will not be doing jobs. 0Or you can also ascend into a very chaotic country wherein everyone is famishing the black mirror type of thing. Right? Then there is this other thought process as well that if we see the progress from how when we started without computers and then computers came in so people were like all the people who were maintaining computers, they will lose their job. But what happened was that those people became computer operators and they became developers, they became coders or they became dev guys and so much more. So in a way human life improved but that job was not I mean the job market didn’t reduce. So the other thought process is a very happy word wherein companies can roll out features 10X of the speed of what is happening now because ChatGPT is there to help every developers and then companies don’t want to lose the edge. So Microsoft would want to whatever they envision to do in ten years, they would want to do it in one year. And because of that every company that is competing, they will use AI and they will want to roll out features and product finishes really fast. And if that happens, then human life and the way human live, that will improve, but the job market will not go away. Yeah, so I’m kind of in both ways, like sometimes I think the other one is true and sometimes I go over here, but in what ways ChatGPT has already improved our performance. So one thing was Push AI of course, that was very fun to make and we already where we want to head into another was that we started ChatGPT to do code reviews for our repos. We started with few GitHub repos, but it’s more like the AI can recognize what your formatting was and a lot of team members are working on your code base. The AI can now point out that this is the structure that you followed previously and now you’re moving away from that. So those type of ways, that is amazing. That is amazing to help and even to catch box in a way. I think I’ve actually met few team members who say that they cannot now operate without GitHub copilot. So I think in a way, we are moving to a direction where ChatGPT or any other form of AI will be used by us in one way or the other.
Matt Zahab
That was a great explanation. Thank you for that. Just for the listeners, just to give you a little example. So, Baby AGI, I haven’t played around with it a whole lot, but Baby AGI is currently sort of the most complex and useful, efficient way of using AGI, which is, again, the full spectrum of AGI, which learns from itself and can actually complete multiple tasks. So currently with ChatGPT, if I wanted to crank out, let’s say, an ecommerce business, the only thing I could do is be like, hey ChatGPT, pretend you are an expert ecommerce founder, marketer, whatever, and give me an idea in niche X. It will give you the idea. Then I can go, all right, I want a website, crank me out the code. It’ll, crank out the code. With Baby AGI and then, realistically, probably two, three years down the road, I can literally go on to this level or this units or this platform AGI. And I can literally be like, make me an ecommerce website. Connect it with Stripe, allow payment processing, hook up an intercom chat bot, blah, blah, blah. Find me warehouses in China so I can source products. It will do everything for you, including sending those emails to these suppliers in China so you can source those products. It takes care of everything, and this is scary because just like Harsh said, jobs are going to be nonexistent. What new jobs will come of this? I’m sure there will be dozens and dozens. Just like when the sort of Web2 revolution came around, a bunch of new jobs came out. I don’t know how many new jobs will come out. It’ll definitely be more lost than gained. But this is something scary and this sort of brings us into the whole creator economy, right? Where it’s like that might be the difference later on, where unless you have some type of skill set to monetize more specifically in the attention economy space, like, what else are humans going to be able to do, right? I don’t know if people are going to be infatuated by a get ready with me video or here’s the rundown of business and sports video. You know what I mean? So it’s like Harsh, I’m constantly thinking about this shit and I’m like, where do I see myself 5 10 years down the road? What kind of businesses do I need to create to not be insolvent by then and be irrelevant and not being able to contribute to the workforce? It’s truly scary. But on the flip side, again, even just in my day to day life, how much easier it’s made life. And again, we’re not even talking about AGI. Once AGI comes around, I’m going to be able to speak into a computer and tell it to clear my inbox for me, it’s going to be some pretty cool stuff. Besides the things that you and I just talked about, are there any other sort of non obvious areas that really tickle your fancy? The obvious ones being chat bots, for example. Heck, you guys just created one. Like all of customers. I can’t see customer service being a thing in three, four years with how good AI is, obviously website creation, coding, marketing, copy, all that kind of stuff. Are there any non obvious ones that I didn’t mention that really excite you in regards to what ChatGPT or piece of AI can attribute to?
Harsh Rajat
Sure. Again, this is very fascinating for me. So there’s so many things like I’m a huge fan of agents. So apart from AGI, what you mentioned is basically AI essentially figuring out what to do, dividing it into different tasks and assigning its own AI to different things and then talking to them out and figuring the best way out. So I’m very excited about that. I think AI will become personal assistant. Like the best personal assistant you had. It will know your habits, it will know what you want to do. It will even know your personality as you talk to it more and more, so that will be really amazing. I mean, if you compare to it or if you just think about it, like when computers were invented, no one thought that we are going to play Doom or different computer games on it and that will become the biggest economy, right? Or e-sports will be bought. I don’t think we are even scratching the surface with AI. We are just using some of the basic things that we understand. But it will go even bigger. Like there will be so many cool things that will come in. I do feel that it will help people more, but we’ll see because I’m also scared like how it will be. If for example, a job that you and I can do, AI can do it better, then what is exactly? I mean the train of thought is that then that gives you time to be more creative. So we will have more creativeness and innovativeness in this space. But the other thing is what if you’re not that creative? Or what if we are over imagining things and I’m not that creative, so what will happen? So we’ll find out. And I think that is how human progress is done. When Web3 came and Bitcoin came and Ethereum came and people were like why do we into money? And now we realize that Web3 is a better form of Web2. So I think that is how each innovation comes. And I’m just excited to be in this era. So, yeah.
Matt Zahab
It will truly be a lot of fun. It’s such an interesting topic and we definitely could spend, heck, probably a couple of days on this, but we’ll jump back into crypto. You did a great job of going over Push and what exactly you guys are doing. I think we’ve done a really good job covering sort of the 360 degree ecosystem on what you guys do and what you have shipping, what you are shipping, rather what other areas of crypto are tickling your see at the moment? There’s been a couple of debates. I’m sure you saw the UD and Greg Foss sort of shit show on Twitter that happened over the last couple of days. There was some beef at Bitcoin Miami. We don’t really need to get into that. I’m not a big drama guy, and candidly, I don’t think that’s newsworthy nonetheless. But what areas of crypto Harsh are tickling your fancy at the moment?
Harsh Rajat
Wow. I took two days break from Twitter.
Harsh Rajat
And now you come back on and saw it all.
Harsh Rajat
Not informed enough. That’s crypto for you. Communication, I think, is a big thing. And I already said that, so I’m not going to go into that. I think L-2s and scaling would be also very big. If we want to bring in a billion users to Web3, we need to have the infrastructure for those billion users. Right? And we have seen that with ordinals in Bitcoin and even Ethereum gas fees, like when the market turns volatile, like how costly it can get. So I would say, like, in two, three years, we’ll probably figure L-2 S out and that would probably be the end of the scalability issue. And then Web3 can truly be or Web2 can truly be ported over to Web3. But yeah, apart from communication, if I wasn’t keen on fixing communication, I would have probably picked working in an L-2 area or solving the speed and scalability, but I think I don’t have that much. I’m not that smart to do it, but I’m very bullish that a lot of gigabit brain people are trying to tackle this problem and they’re trying to solve it through zkEVM, through roll ups and so many other things.
Matt Zahab
Any teams, protocols, dApps currently that have a good lead on this or that you’re fond of?
Harsh Rajat
Sure, I mean, I’m super fond of Polygon just because I had the pleasure of knowing Polygon team and I kind of remember a conversation where they realized that, okay, this is going to be the future, like two years before that game. So super bullish on that. Like Arbitram as well I like their tech as well. So, yeah, if I have to choose, maybe Polygon.
Matt Zahab
Love that. Harsh buzzing as always, man, this was another great episode. Love chatting with you as always. Any good news regarding Push coming up over the next and again, this episode is going to air early June. Any Push news coming out over the rest of the summer?
Harsh Rajat
So lot of news, guys. We actually were trying to make sure that we are ready with a lot of products, so I’m just going to give alpha after alpha. So Push Protocol V2 is happening. What it does enables fee pool, enables incentivized chat. Incentivized chat is essentially a way for celebrity chat wallets to charge in case they want to for any interaction. Otherwise chat by default is already opt in. So it’s just an opt in feature for the user if they want to switch to that harvesting and yield farming that has been extended by 84 weeks, that’s going to launch very soon. We just completed the ChainSafe audit but we are going to announce hack bounty for it with some other team players just to make sure that it’s super safe and to also give you the incentives to try to hack it and make it better for all of us. So yeah, that’s happening. Product wise, we are going to launch NFTChat. I know you might have heard about NFT communications. NFT communication till now wasn’t figured out. It was mostly wallet to wallet communication. We figured out the NFT communication. That means your Lens NFT or your UD NFT finally will be able to communicate with another NFT and you will be able to import your communication as well. That’s happening. That’s very cool. And lastly, we are not stopping on chat. We just rolled out Push Video and Push Audio. Again, a protocol level way for wallet to wallet to just video call or audio call. Hopefully by the time this episode airs, the SDK of it will be out as well. Mostly next time when I’m talking to Matt we’ll probably talk on a podcast powered by Push Video and we are just using our wallets and NFTS as like that.
Matt Zahab
We’ve been pretty loyal to Riverside 230 something episodes in and we’ve been loyal. Every single one has been done there. But you know what Harsh I’d love to break the streak. I’ll have to cheat on Riverside and that’d be awesome jump on platform.
Harsh Rajat
Or we can ask Riverside to move to Web3.
Matt Zahab
That’d be lovely as well. I’ll broker the deal. I’ll take give me 1% and then we’ll call it a day. I’ll get them to slide over, you guys can acquire them and integrate the best of both worlds.
Harsh Rajat
Speaking about acquisition, there might be some help over there as well.
Matt Zahab
Love that. Harsh dropping the news as always. Mate really appreciate you coming on. Always have a blast chatting with you and always learned a ton. Thank you so much as always. Before you go, please let our listeners know where they can find you and Push Protocol online and on socials.
Harsh Rajat
Sure. So guys, in case you like my chatter then probably follow my Twitter and we can chat one on one. Just find me @harshrajat. Do go to push.org, visit it out or app.push.org and see all the features by yourself. If you’re a developer, go to Developer Dog. But most importantly, if you like Push Protocol, just head to Twitter and follow Push Protocol. So yeah, see you on Twitter.
Matt Zahab
It always lives on Twitter. See you on Twitter and see you on the Push Network. Harsh, thanks again man. Really appreciate it and can’t wait to have you on for round three.
Harsh Rajat
Thanks Matt again, was really excited for this podcast. Thanks for doing it. I had super great fun.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Harsh Rajat, Co-Founder and Project Lead of Push Protocol. Great to have him on for round two. Can’t wait to have him on for round three. Dropping knowledge bombs, as always. We love to see it. Huge shout out to the listeners, as always. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would truly mean the world to my team and I. Speaking of the team, love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor. You are the GOAT. Appreciate you and love you. And back to the listeners. Keep on growing those bags keep on saying healthy, wealthy and happy. Keep on chugging along. Some good days ahead. Love you guys. Thanks for listening as always and we will talk soon. Bye for now.
