Introducing Push Chain: A Shared State L1 for Universal Apps
Summary
This proposal introduces Push Chain, the next evolution of Push Protocol. Built on top of years of innovation, Push Chain transforms the Push technology from a notification and chat standard into a universal blockchain designed for scalable consumer and universal applications.
Built as a shared-state Proof-of-Stake layer 1, Push Chain enables seamless transactions, liquidity bridging, and smart contract interoperability across EVM and non-EVM chains. Push Chain aims to simplify web3 user experiences by introducing features like wallet abstraction, fee abstraction, and universal smart contracts, paving the way for truly unified apps. In short, Push Chain enables any app to be accessed by any user from any chain.
Additionally, Push Chain is situated to form the infrastructure for on-chain AI. Push Chain’s shared state, fast finality, sharding, tx payload size, and ability to have users from any chain allow it to support fast, multi-use AI use cases (agents, apps) across all of web3.
The notification and chat protocols will integrate with Push Chain, transforming these activities into value-accruing transactions while maintaining their status as de-facto standards. The project invites community feedback on the whitepaper as it continues to refine its roadmap and build toward a universal web3.
Note: This governance proposal is for community review, discussion, and consideration. Push Chain mainnet is not live, nor is any token related to Push Chain besides Push Protocol $PUSH. Any communication about Push Chain will come directly from the Push company website and X / Twitter handle.
Background and Overview
Push Protocol has established itself as the de facto communication layer for web3, enabling any dapp, smart contract, or backend system to seamlessly send real-time notifications, chat, or onchain communications. Since its inception, the Push ecosystem has focused on driving real-world adoption of web3 by enhancing overall user experience (UX).
With notifications, Push Protocol bridged the communication gap between web3 protocols and their users. Through the chat product, Push Protocol introduced a truly web3-native communication system that allows users to interact using only their web3 wallets in a decentralized manner - avoiding any reliance on web2 mechanisms. Additionally, Push Protocol expanded its offerings for chat with features such as group chats, video chats, and audio live streaming.
Beyond improving web3 UX, Push Protocol has actively worked to enhance developer experience (DevX). With its SDKs, developers can seamlessly integrate web3-native chat and group chat functionality into their dApps. Push’s showrunner system further empowers developers to integrate real-time notifications for their protocols, dapps, or backend services. This has enabled Push Protocol to support notification and communication systems for leading web3 protocols, including Snapshot, ShapeShift, and Unstoppable Domains.
In short, Push Protocol pioneered communication for web3, becoming the leading notification protocol in the ecosystem and one of its first consumer-facing applications. To date, Push Protocol has delivered over 140 million notifications to leading protocols worldwide. Some of the protocols powered by Push include:
dydx - Uniswap - Unstoppable Domain
Lens Protocol - Shapeshift - CoW Swap
Revoke.Cash - Coindesk - Snapshot
ENS - 1inch - Decentraland
Hyperliquid - MetaMask Snap - Cartesi
EthOS - Quickswap - And so many more!
All of Push Protocol’s efforts have consistently been directed towards three major goals:
1. Enabling better UX for the overall web3 ecosystem.
2. Driving mass adoption of web3-native apps.
3. Creating one of the first web3-compatible consumer apps (EVM and non-EVM).
While we improved the UX of dapps through our communication layer, we recognized that core issues in web3 remained unresolved, posing significant hurdles to our vision of driving mass adoption with better UX. We identified the following key challenges:
1. Web3 is not well-equipped for building truly scalable and consumer-centric apps.
2. The fragmented blockchain ecosystem makes it nearly impossible to improve the overall web3 UX for the average user.
3. Achieving a truly synchronous and unified execution layer is still not feasible.
These insights led us to develop as part of Push Protocol - a solution for notification nodes. We built these notification nodes to be truly scalable (linearly, as more nodes are added) and capable of serving as a universal hub for interacting with all blockchains.
However, as we built these notification nodes - originally called Push Nodes - we realized that what we had built extended far beyond notifications. It holds broader significance and has the potential to profoundly impact web3 as a whole. This realization has led us to submit this proposal.
This proposal is an extensive document that outlines these concerns, how we aim to address them, and the upcoming changes that are critical for Push Protocol and its entire ecosystem.
The Core Problems in Web3
To understand what we aim to solve, it’s important to first examine the major concerns in web3 today.
1. Web3 is not well-equipped for building truly scalable and consumer-centric apps.
The entire web3 ecosystem is heavily skewed toward financial applications. This focus on DeFi is evident in the proliferation of blockchain projects centered around trading, lending, staking, re-staking, perpetual trading, and similar activities.
While these innovations have their own significance, they have also inadvertently narrowed web3’s true potential, overshadowing non-financial and consumer-centric applications that could drive mass adoption.
This financial-centric focus has created a perception that web3 is primarily a playground for traders and investors rather than a tool for everyday life. It’s now clear that for mass adoption to occur, web3 must expand beyond its financial roots and embrace a wider range of consumer applications—ones that are both appealing and beneficial to the average user.
This need for diversification was also highlighted by Vitalik at the recent Devcon, where he emphasized the importance of “mixed financial + non-financial” applications.
To build truly consumer-centric applications for the average user, the underlying infrastructure must fulfill the following requirements:
1.1. A simplified and seamless user experience: Consumer applications need to prioritize ease of use, removing unnecessary complexity.
1.2. Instant finality and scalability: The infrastructure must support the speed and scale required by typical consumer apps to ensure a smooth experience.
1.3. Negligible usage costs: The cost of using an application should be almost negligible. High gas fees are a significant barrier to adoption. Affordable and efficient storage solutions are also essential for the success of consumer apps.
1.4. Shared app experiences: Applications must abstract away wallets, chains, and fees to create a unified user experience. For instance: A) Transactions should be possible from any chain. B) Wallet login should work seamlessly for both web3 users and newcomers. C) Fees should be flexible—payable by the app itself, via a fee contract in the native token of the respective chain, or through wallet delegation.
The major challenge today lies in the lack of infrastructure that adequately supports these requirements, which are essential for creating scalable and user-friendly consumer applications.
2. The fragmented blockchain ecosystem makes it nearly impossible to improve the overall web3 UX for the average user.
Since the Rollup-Centric Ethereum Roadmap was proposed on October 2, 2020, Ethereum has embraced rollups as its primary scaling strategy. Rollups significantly increase transaction throughput and reduce transaction costs by bundling multiple transactions into batches. However, this approach has led to a proliferation of chains, including L1s, L2s, and even L3s.
As these new chains have emerged, the overall web3 user experience has grown increasingly complex, especially for the average user. Users now need to manage multiple wallets, each potentially holding different tokens across various chains. Moreover, the process of bridging assets between chains is often cumbersome and risky. It relies on multiple bridging protocols, which not only add complexity but also introduce potential security vulnerabilities.
The lack of a unified user interface exacerbates this issue, forcing users to switch between different web3 apps and interfaces to manage their assets, track transactions, and interact with protocols.
3. Achieving a truly synchronous and unified execution layer is still not feasible.
A shared state chain is essential to enable shared app experiences. This chain must have the ability to read the state of wallets across other chains, facilitating universal smart contracts and creating an ecosystem where users from any chain—or even web2—can interact seamlessly. Such a chain would provide shared settlement across both EVM and non-EVM chains, ushering in an era of universal apps and shared experiences.
With shared state capabilities, universal app experiences become possible. Users, regardless of their origin—whether from any chain or ecosystem—can effortlessly interact with consumer apps that prioritize user engagement without regard to how or where they enter the system.
Our Proposal
Push Protocol proposes the development and launch of Push Chain, a shared-state L1 blockchain designed to support truly scalable consumer applications and universal apps.
Push Chain is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain built to empower developers to create universal applications and serve as a shared settlement layer for multiple L1s, L2s, and L3s. It enables transactions from any chain, incorporates gas abstraction to eliminate the complexity of cross-chain interactions, and provides wallet abstraction for seamless onboarding and signing for both existing web3 users and newcomers from web2.
Push Chain introduces a new transaction type, which we define as consumer transactions (where ordering is not critical), enabling non-financial apps to achieve the speed and scalability required by typical consumer applications. It leverages innovative mechanisms such as orderless blocks, parallel block execution, and dynamic sharding to deliver true scalability.
By addressing the challenges posed by fragmented chains, Push Chain creates the ideal environment for consumer applications and universal apps to thrive, heralding a new era of seamless shared app experiences.
We will achieve this vision through three key phases, each addressing the specific challenges faced by applications in that segment:
1) Phase 1: Consumer-Centric Apps. This phase focuses on empowering the development of truly scalable applications. It introduces support for transactions from any chain, a virtual machine capable of handling smarter and more complex applications, and the concept of consumer transactions, where transaction ordering is not critical. Additionally, it implements fee abstraction, enabling users to pay fees from their chain of choice or directly via the web3 app, and wallet abstraction for seamless social logins and cross-chain compatibility. These features are designed to create a more user-friendly and accessible environment for both web3 users and newcomers from web2.
2) Phase 2: Enabling Seamless Interoperability. This intermediary phase focuses on creating a unified L1 by enabling seamless and unified liquidity bridging between blockchains.
3) Phase 3: Universal Smart Contracts and Shared State. This phase unlocks the potential for universal applications by enabling seamless chain-to-chain settlement and establishing a shared state that supports cross-chain interactions.
Phase 1: Consumer Centric Apps
The objective of Phase 1 is to establish infrastructure that supports the development and growth of consumer-centric and mixed or non-financial decentralized applications. This phase is designed to accommodate various types of applications that can thrive on Push Chain’s capabilities, including:
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PMF Apps Expanding Their User Base. Applications that have achieved product-market fit within a specific chain ecosystem but seek to reach users across multiple blockchains are a perfect fit for Push Chain. Examples include prediction market apps that are accessible to all users, naming services that resolve to wallets across different chains, and other PMF-driven dapps.
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Decentralized Social Apps Requiring Fast Finality and Scalability. Social platforms benefit greatly from Push Chain’s fast, sub-second finality and its ability to unify users across blockchains. Push Chain is an ideal platform to build next-generation social apps such as social investing platforms (e.g., GoFundMe or grants), decentralized alternatives to Reddit, Telegram, or TikTok, and other social networks where features like replies, likes, and user connections rely on unordered transactions (consumer transactions).
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Utility Apps with Universal Reach. These applications thrive on combining user bases from all blockchains. Examples include email services, notifications and chat platforms, blogging tools, decentralized wikis, and internet archives. These apps benefit from a unified web3 user base, making Push Chain the perfect environment for their growth.
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Gaming and Degen Apps. Gaming and degen apps can leverage Push Chain to enable cross-chain participation. Examples include poker platforms, slot games, sports betting, fantasy sports, shared lottery systems like PoolTogether, trading card platforms, and gacha games. Apps in this category benefit from storing intermediate user states or combining user bases across blockchains.
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Unified Data Layer for AI Agents. AI agents (autonomous programs acting on behalf of users or protocols) often need to access, analyze, and react to a large variety of onchain and offchain data. Push Chain’s tx payload size and dynamic sharding capabilities allow more effective AI agents to be trained and optimized for onchain decision making.
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AI based User Modeling to improve UX / Context-Awareness. Using Push Chain’s unified user identity (Push ID), AI agents can retrieve a user’s aggregated state from multiple chains—assets, past activities, communication history, and more. This comprehensive, chain-agnostic view helps AI agents deliver more contextualized and accurate responses or services.
Requirements of building these apps and providing the smoothest onboarding is what guides the Phase 1 of Push Chain. We aim to enable the following features to ensure innovation on the chain can thrive on:
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Blockchain agnostic wallet addresses
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Support txs from any chain
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Fee abstraction
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Wallet abstraction
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Push ID: mapping multiple wallets to a single DID
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Different types of nodes to enable true scale
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True Scale in processing txs through parallel validators
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True Scale in fetching txs through dynamic sharding
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Virtual machine implementation
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Proof of Stake to ensure honest nodes and tx data
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
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Blockchain agnostic wallet addresses
(a) As a shared-state blockchain, Push Chain is designed to handle and interpret blockchain addresses alongside the specific chains they originate from. To achieve this, Push Chain fully adopts CAIP-10 blockchain-agnostic wallet addresses, enabling it to deduce the chain, network, and address associated with each transaction. This ensures compatibility across multiple blockchain ecosystems.
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Support txs from any chain
(a) A universal chain must have the capability to support transactions from any wallet, regardless of the originating chain, including Ethereum, Solana, and others. Push Chain achieves this by accepting signed payload data and supporting the native signers of individual chains. Validator nodes verify these signatures, conduct pre-transaction checks (such as fee validation), and then admit the transactions.
(b) Additionally, transactions initiated from wallets are stored as records mapped to a specific Push ID (#4 “Wallet abstraction”). This mapping allows for reverse lookups, ensuring that any wallet can be seamlessly associated with a Push ID. This feature guarantees a consistent and unified interface for users, no matter which wallet they use.
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Fee abstraction
(a) Fees abstraction is critical for any consumer-centric chain, as it removes friction for existing web3 users onboarding to Push Chain.
(b) Push Chain envisions charging transaction fees in its native token (more information on the token will come presuming the Push Chain proposal passes governance). However, it does not impose a strict requirement for the specific wallet initiating the transaction to hold the fee tokens. Instead, fees can be paid by other wallets or even directly by the web3 application. This is achieved through smart contracts (referred to as fee contracts) deployed on all supported blockchains. These contracts can lock tokens, which can later be released upon submitting the respective signatures from Push Nodes.
(c) To ensure seamless interaction, even when users lack Push Chain’s native token, the fee contracts act as automated swappers. These contracts accept the native currency of the originating chain (e.g., ETH), swap it for Push Chain tokens, and lock the swapped tokens. This functionality allows users to interact with Push Chain using the native tokens of their respective chains, enabling frictionless onboarding.
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Wallet abstraction
(a) Wallet abstraction allows any wallet from any chain to connect and interact with Push Chain. This ensures a seamless experience for existing web3 users while enabling web2 newcomers to log in via email or social platforms and create a Push Wallet.
(b) For users logging in via email or social platforms, Push Chain ensures security and non-custodial functionality through key sharding. The user’s credentials are divided into three encrypted shards stored across the Push Backend (trusted), local storage (encrypted via a passkey), and Push Chain (also encrypted via a passkey). This approach allows key reconstruction only when accessed by the user, providing a secure yet user-friendly experience that bridges the gap between web2 familiarity and web3 security.
(c) Push Chain enables a signless interface for users with a Push Wallet, accessible through the embeddable wallet service at wallet.push.org. While existing web3 users can continue using their preferred wallets and chains, onboarding to Push Wallet abstracts away additional web3 complexities. Furthermore, Push ID mapping ensures that transactions performed with any wallet remain retrievable and consistently associated with the user’s Push Wallet, streamlining the experience for all users.
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Push ID: mapping multiple wallets to a single DID
(a) Push Chain recognizes that users often manage multiple wallets and facilitates user-based web3 applications by accrediting transactions to a unified Push ID instead of being limited to wallet-based interactions.
(b) This is achieved by mapping wallets to a Push ID and reverse mapping transactions sent from wallets back to the associated Push ID. This approach allows wallets to send transactions while enabling applications to fetch and index these transactions through the Push ID, creating a seamless and user-centric interface.
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Different type of nodes to enable true scale
(a) Push Chain defines true scalability as the ability of the network to increase both read and write throughput as the number of nodes in the network grows. This scalability is essential for consumer applications, which often require handling thousands of consumer transactions alongside a smaller number of financial transactions.
(b) To optimize performance, Push Chain categorizes nodes into three types: Validator nodes, responsible for validating transactions; Storage nodes, which dynamically shard data based on the hash of blockchain-agnostic addresses and store it; and Archival nodes, which maintain a full snapshot of all transactions on the network.
(c) Push Chain employs a registry smart contract to register these nodes, manage dynamic sharding, set replication factors, and enable parallel validators that scale dynamically with the number of nodes in the network. This approach ensures linear scaling, allowing the network to handle increased read and write demands efficiently as it grows.
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True scale in processing txs through parallel validators
(a) Push Chain achieves true scaling of write transactions, particularly for consumer transactions, by allowing these transactions to be processed through any active validator node. Randomization and attestation mechanisms ensure that transactions cannot be falsified, and the selection of validators for each transaction is always random (see point 10).
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True scale in fetching txs through dynamic sharding
(a) Push Chain achieves true scaling of reading transactions by implementing dynamic sharding on storage nodes. Data chunks within each shard are mapped to blockchain-agnostic addresses and are dynamically redistributed as new storage nodes are added to the network.
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Virtual machine implementation
(a) Push Chain is working on introducing a virtual machine (VM) to the devnet. The VM will enable the development of complex applications with their own logic, supporting conditional transaction processing tailored to the needs of application developers.
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Proof of Stake for honest nodes and tx data
(a) To join the network, each node must stake the native token of Push Chain. When a transaction is submitted, the network assigns a randomized token that specifies the validator node responsible for handling the transaction and lists additional validator nodes required for attestation.*
(b) The transaction owner submits the transaction along with this token to the network. The designated validator node then validates the transaction, conducts fee checks, and requests attestation from peer validators. If any attesting node identifies a malicious transaction, a challenge round is initiated to slash the responsible validator. If the challenge fails, the attesting node is slashed, effectively deterring malicious activity.
(c) A similar mechanism is applied to transaction retrieval from storage nodes. If a wrong quorum is detected, a challenge round is triggered, leading to slashing for malicious behavior.
Detailed information about Phase 1, including the features and network design outlined here, is available in our whitepaper. The whitepaper is currently in draft mode and subject to change. We encourage everyone in our community to provide comments and feedback.
*Information about Push Chain’s native token will come following the governance proposal for Push Chain.
Phase 2: Enabling Seamless Interoperability
While Phase 1 focuses on establishing the foundation of Push Chain to support shared app experiences and laying the groundwork for a shared state and settlement layer, Phase 2 builds upon this by enabling seamless interoperability between blockchains. This phase is a critical step toward achieving full unification in Phase 3, allowing developers to access wallet states (balances and smart contract states) on various chains to create universal smart contracts capable of interacting across ecosystems.
It’s important to note that the specifications for both Phase 2 and Phase 3 are still under research and are subject to change.
Phase 2 prioritizes enabling liquidity bridging and smart contract message passing between Push Chain and other blockchains, as well as between external source chains and their destination chains. This is an essential intermediate step toward creating a chain that can handle all forms of interaction, including uniting chains to send transactions, facilitating liquidity transfers, making smart contract calls across chains, and reading wallet states from other chains. This vision abstracts away web3 complexity, delivering a seamless experience for the average user.
By enabling these capabilities, Phase 2 unlocks a wide variety of applications and use cases that can be built on Push Chain. Some examples of applications that can emerge from this phase include:
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Unified DEXes. With bridging capabilities, tokens and stablecoins from any chain can be utilized to create a seamless decentralized exchange (DEX). This onchain, consumer-friendly platform would enable smooth exchanges and transfers across chains.
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Web3 Portfolios. By mapping wallets through Push ID and leveraging seamless interoperability, web3 portfolios can track balances and assets across multiple chains, providing users with a unified view of their holdings.
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Unified DeFi Apps. Users from any chain can lend and borrow, addressing fragmented liquidity and enabling applications that act as universal liquidity hubs—taking liquidity from one chain and providing it to another.
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Trading NFTs Across Chains. NFTs from different chains can be bridged and traded within a single application, further unifying the web3 ecosystem and enhancing accessibility for NFT enthusiasts.
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Seamless Interoperability for Chain Agnostic AI Actions. AI agents often need to act across multiple ecosystems—one chain might have liquidity pools, another might have NFT marketplaces, and another might have lending protocols. Using interop and knowledge of multiple user wallets across chains, an AI agent could rebalance a user’s DeFi positions on Ethereum, list NFTs on Polygon, and communicate status updates to the user via a messaging app on another chain, all through one unified settlement layer.
Phase 3: Unified universal smart contract and shared state
The final and most ambitious phase focuses on simplifying the experience for everyday web3 users. It achieves this by enabling read-only state access for wallets across all EVM and non-EVM chains and introducing a VM capable of accessing Push ID. This allows all wallets mapped to a user to be retrieved, along with the state of those wallets on their respective chains.
The universal smart contract and the ability to interact with all chains from Push Chain represent Push’s ultimate goal: the final abstraction of web3 friction for users. This creates a unified ecosystem where, for example, a user of Uniswap on Ethereum, Arbitrum, or Polygon simply becomes a user of Uniswap, regardless of the chain they or the protocol reside on.
This phase unlocks unprecedented possibilities, ushering in an era of Universal Apps where users simply log in and use a web3 application for its features, no matter which chain the protocol is on or from which chain(s) the user accesses it.
Some examples of unique applications it creates:
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Universal Web3 DEXes. Enable abstracted swaps on any chain by utilizing state information from multiple wallets, facilitating seamless fund movement and swaps.
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Universal Web3 DeFi. Provide unified liquidity across EVM and non-EVM chains, delivering seamless DeFi services to users.
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Universal Web3 DAOs. Allow DAO voting by aggregating votes across chains for a single user.
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Unified Web3 Gaming. Bring players from different chains together for unified tournaments or gaming sessions.
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Unified Web3 Marketplace. Abstract NFT trades, enabling seamless swaps across any chain.
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Universal Web3 Socials. Enhance web3 social platforms with token gating, NFT gating, or user behavior-based gating.
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Universal Web3 Analytics and Recommendation. Enable analytics to track user activity and capabilities, unlocking recommendation engines, AI based decision engines, targeted promotions, and other innovative features
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AI and Universal Smart Contracts. AI agents will be able to analyze and leverage states from multiple chains in a unified manner. They will incorporate complex logic that dynamically adapts to data sourced from different ecosystems. This unlocks even more sophisticated AI-driven services (e.g. universal AI financial advisors, multi-chain governance delegates, cross-chain content recommendation engines) functioning seamlessly in one integrated environment.
Current Progress on Push Chain
We wanted to give all our users a glimpse of what Push has achieved behind the scenes. We are excited to unveil along with this proposal:
- Push Chain Website: A one pager explaining the vision outlined.
- Push Chain Knowledgebase: Knowledge base that contains all the inner workings of Push Chain.
- Push Chain Whitepaper: Indepth paper on Push Chain.
- Push Chain Devnet: Push Chain devnet that is running on Proof of Stake validators, storage and archival nodes and is able to do consumer txs.
- Push Chain Simulate Tx: A way for everyone to send tx from any chain using wallet abstraction.
A Note on Tokens
As a new L1, Push Chain would have its own native token with new tokenomics suited to the functioning of the blockchain. Currently, this governance proposal introduces Push Chain as a potential direction for the Push ecosystem. If approved, Push would then introduce tokenomics for feedback and discussion among the community. A priority for Push Chain tokenomics is to ensure that all Push Protocol $PUSH holders are able to migrate their tokens to the Push Chain native token (ticker TBD) for a proportional ownership in the new blockchain.
What Happens to Push Notification and Push Chat
Today’s push notification and chat protocols will benefit significantly from being built on top of Push Chain. A dedicated section of the team will focus on maintaining and enhancing these protocols, ensuring they remain the de-facto standard in their respective domains.
By aligning with Push Chain, notifications and chat sent through the protocols will be processed as transactions on the chain. This integration not only enables these protocols to accrue value but also marks the beginning of a new chapter in their evolution, further enhancing their utility and impact within the web3 ecosystem.
Resources
Whitepaper: Push Chain Whitepaper - External
Website: https://push.org/chain
Knowledge Base: https://push.org/chain/knowledge
Push Scan: https://scan.push.org/
Simulate Tx: https://simulate.push.org/
What’s Next?
Read the whitepaper
Visit Knowledge Hub
Vote on the proposal
For Push Team
Request for Build for Devs
Showcase demo apps
Incentivized Testnet
SDK Docs
Next Year plans of Push Team
Incentivized testnet coming next, let’s build universal apps!
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