August 10 2022

Complete Guide to EPNS Governance | How, What & Where

Governance is a crucial thing for every Web3 project as this provides everyone an opportunity to raise their voice and makes it certain that the voice of every user is heard. Today in this blog we are going to talk about the governance mechanisms of EPNS protocol aka The decentralized communication protocol for the Web3 ecosystem.

Let’s start with a quick introduction of EPNS itself:

What is the EPNS Protocol ?

EPNS aka Ethereum Push Notification Service is a dapp built on the top of the Ethereum blockchain using which users can get notification from their favorite other dapps in a platform independent manner via decentralized push notifications.

EPNS is an Indian project built by a dynamic duo of Harsh Rajat & Richa Joshi, they saw the gap in the ecosystem, and found out what can make the user experience better, and built the EPNS protocol.

Now let’s dive into the governance of EPNS:

$PUSH Tokens

Push tokens are the native governance token of the EPNS protocol, and are used for voting on the governance proposal, incentivizing users and supporters, giving out grants, etc. The total supply of the $PUSH tokens is 100 Million and 53% of the total supply of $PUSH is for the community. Push tokens have one of the best tokenomics in the entire Web3 ecosystem. You can read and learn more about PUSH tokens at Coinmarketcap.

Before we dive further, let me make few things clear about the $PUSH tokens and the EPNS protocol governance:

PUSH token holders can only vote for the governance protocols of the EPNS protocol.
Token holders do not have any rights to change the company’s operation, management or internal policies.
PUSH token holders can vote on proposals to make changes in the protocol such as Protocol fees, Notifications fees, Grants, and other in-protocol proposals.
PUSH tokens are not meant to be used as a medium to pay debts, do transactions in exchange for any goods or similar things.

In order to take part in the EPNS governance, first you need to create an account of the EPNS’s governance forum by visiting https://gov.epns.io/

Whats Inside Ricky Berwick GIFfrom Whats Inside GIFs

What is inside EPNS’s Governance forum ?

After creating an account on the governance forum you would be able to like & comment on the different active and inactive proposals. After a proposal is created it will be posted on the forum and if it will get a certain number of likes and positive replies then it will be moved to next steps, this criteria is different for different kinds of proposals.

Before we learn more about the types of proposals, let’s first learn about the different roles on the EPNS governance.

EPNS Governance Roles

In EPNS Governance, there are four main roles:

PUSH Nominee: A PUSH Nominee is an active member of the community who strongly supports the vision of EPNS. The people who own $PUSH tokens can then choose to give their voting rights to any Push Nominee, who can use Snapshot to vote on governance proposals.

PUSH Delegatees are active members of the community who have been given at least 75,000 $PUSH. They will be able to make proposals on Snapshot that are approved on the forum.

PUSH Holders: People who own $PUSH can give their voting power to anyone, even themselves. They can also give it to a PUSH Delegatee to make sure that their opinions and ideas are heard. The person who is in charge of PUSH can be changed at any time.

PUSH Champions: Making sure the community feels like it has power is an important part of decentralization. PUSH Champions are involved members of the community who help the EPNS metagovernance in different ways. There are three types of people who are PUSH Champions.

Community Champions are leaders in Web3 who believe in the goals of EPNS and are willing to teach and give the community the tools it needs to carry out progressive, decentralized governance.

Team Champions are EPNS team members who are committed to helping the community set up a fair way of running things.

Elected Champions: Elected members of the community who have been given the responsibility to help the community run the governance process smoothly at each stage of a proposal. Soon, there will be more information about the elected champions, such as how they were chosen, how they were chosen, and what rewards they will get. In an ideal world, we will choose the first group by putting out another idea so that people can join in. We will look into different ways to pay these champions.

This is all that you need to know about the different available roles on the EPNS governance forum. Now let’s talk about different types of proposals and how they are processed on the governance forum.

Proposals can range from changing protocol fees structure, giving out grants, nominating yourself for a role to getting selected as a PUSH Rockstar.

Proposals flow on the EPNS governance

A proposal created could be anything from changing fee structure to nominating someone.
Proposal is posted on the forum for the discussion, here either it will get rejected or will be promoted for the next step. If your proposal requires any changes you will receive the proper feedback and you will be able to resubmit it.
Proposals that are promoted from the discussions are ready for the voting and then those proposals come live on Snapshot for voting.

This flow is for all the governance proposals.

For PUSH rockstars the PUSH team selects the contributors and then a proposal is made and sent out directly on the snapshot for voting.

For PUSH grants program proposals, let’s again deep dive:

First of all visit the PUSH grants page and look for each and every object and then comeback.

Okay, so there is a category called as Proposals, for all the Push grants proposals interested folks need to create a proposal in predefined format/template. Click here to again jump on the page where you will find the template.

Proposals flow for Grants program

Users need to create the proposal using the template provided.
Proposals should be submitted under the Push grants proposal section. After this the proposal will be in the discussion phase where Push champions will take care of everything.
Proposals should be live for at least 7 days and Grant proposals need at least 10 like and 3 comments in favor to get promoted for the next phase that is the polling phase.
A push champion will create a poll for all the eligible grants proposals, in this polling phase the grants should get at least 10 votes either in favor or against, if majority of votes will be in favor the proposal will be set for the Snapshot voting.
If your proposal didn’t get enough votes in favor, you will be provided with enough feedback and you will be encouraged to make the changes and reapply.
If you get the most vote on snapshot, you will receive the grant, Simple!

One extra T&C aka Quorum: – A proposal will be rejected if the total votes received on the proposal is less than 1% of the total circulating supply of PUSH. So suppose if you receive the maximum votes on your proposal and still the the votes of that proposal snapshot are less than 1% of total circulating supply the whole proposal will be rejected as it is an eligibility criteria.

Less than 1% votes shows that there were not enough voters.

For more information about the current active proposals on the EPNS governance, do visit the https://gov.epns.io/ and check out everything there, most of the things are self explanatory, and for any other query do comment down.