This page gives an overview of the Web3 Notification Service - a decentralised, secure email, SMS and Push notification service for developers building dApps on any chain, starting with IC.
Right now, dApps on every blockchain suffer user retention and engagement problems.
Why?
Web3 notifications suck.
As a result, dApps don’t have a good decentralised way to continually engage users; to notify them of events that require their attention, or encourage habit-forming behaviours.
Without notifications, users must remember to constantly log back into your dApp to see if anything has changed, while following a Twitter and/or Discord for alerts. This is an extremely poor user experience that is limiting dApps from succeeding.
If Web3 developers want to use email, SMS or push notification services in our dApps, we’re forced to build centralised off-chain services to manage this for us. This both adds development overhead and also introduces points of failure.
So, as developers, how do we send notifications in the most decentralised way possible, without having to set up lots of new infrastructure?
In late 2022, we released our first product on the IC - an email notification service built with HTTPS outcalls. With this service, developers could engage users with transactional emails straight from their IC canisters.
We used Courier’s idempotent API to make HTTPS calls. Courier then allows developer to configure their email provider of choice (e.g SendGrid, Gmail or SES) to send user emails.
We are excited to announce that we’ve expanded our Web3 Notification Service (W3NS) to support SMS and Push notifications (both Web and Mobile).