Wolf he uttered one more time

But no one came to listen to his cries

Until not one, but many wolves came

And took the little one by surprise

Vitalik has been excited by the following things in the Ethereum application layer:

• Money

  • Private Money

  • Stablecoins

• DeFi

  • Prediction Markets

  • Synthetic Assets

  • Trading and Leverage platforms

• Identity

  • Basic Authentication

  • Attestations

  • Names

  • Proof of personhood

  • Composing all of the above into a single app

• DAOs

• Auditable Centralized Services

  • Voting

  • Government registries

  • Corporate Accounting

  • Supply chain applications/Tracking access authorization

However, there is one piece of infrastructure missing that enables all of these applications.

Let’s rewind way, way, way back into the past, where the Pony Express was the fastest way to send mail from Casper, Wyoming to Carson City, Nevada. It took approximately four days go from Casper to Carson City but only 3.9 days to make the return trip since going eastbound was faster.

Ok, maybe that’s too far into the past.

Let’s fast-forward a bit to 2003, where Blackberry hired a little known company called Research in Motion to send a little message to users whenever they received an email. Bespoke notification services that were built by the manufacturers of the mobile phone quickly gained adoption, but it wasn’t until 2008 when a turtleneck wearing visionary decided to open up notifications to the Apple developer community for anyone to harness. Steve Jobs knew he instantly had a hit when notifications were released to developers. The infamous bell icon started popping up everywhere: from your Facebook page to commercial websites to your photos app.

Notifications suddenly became a core feature of your mobile experience. Every time the bell icon appeared on your screen, it meant that there is something new for you.

🔔 You.

🔔 You.

🔔 You.

🔔 Just You.

Suddenly, mobile users could experience something completely novel. The idea of “You” combined with the idea of “New” and the accessibility of “Now” instantly hit mobile users like a drug cocktail of meth and heroin - addictive, exhilarating, and impossible to quit.

See this graph? 2003 to 2008 is around the time mobile usage went exponential. Where else can you get real time dopamine hits just for you?

Of course, eventually companies realized that instead of making notifications all about “You”, they could send a notification for when one of your facebook friends likes a picture of an avocado toast to boost engagement numbers for advertisers. And just like that, the brief, beautiful period where notifications were all about “You” ended and were replaced with ads, tweets, and random friends liking pictures of cats.

Then one day there really was a wolf, but when the boy shouted they didn’t believe him

As soon as notifications became annoying, we stopped getting excited by them. Of the hundreds of @everyones in your various crypto discord servers, how many do you actually check? Of the dozens of weekly tags on twitters from random twitter users tagging you in fake airdrop posts, do you even look at 10% of them? Of the few etherscan alerts you get from people sending random tokens to your wallets, which alerts are worth checking?

Now, in 2022, the well is truly poisoned, and we have become desensitized to most notifications. I can count on one hand the number of applications that I check when I get a notification: Signal, Slack, Gnosis safe, and Yahoo fantasy sports are the only apps I check.

However, the usefulness of notifications never went away. None of the Ethereum Applications Vitalik mentioned are complete today as they are missing a few critical things, chief among them being the lack of notification services.

Let’s break down each of the applications Vitalik mentioned and how notifications would change the game.

Money - Sending money isn’t completely reliant on notifications for an acceptable user experience. This is because the act of sending money is a synchronous affair: when I send money to someone else, I must initiate a series of actions to send the money. Receiving money, however, is much of a different beast. Let’s say I won the Optimism prize from the ETHIndia hackathon. Instead of checking my wallet every day waiting for the organizers to send USDC, I can instead set a notification on my account to check when my USDC balance changes.

DeFi - The integrations for these are obvious. In a prediction market, your average parlay bet can have more than 10 legs, and you can be running multiple parlay bets per day. Additionally, you can arbitrage against markets that haven’t yet settled if you have a notifications for the prediction market and the event at the same time. Similarly, you can set on-chain notifications to watch DEXes that no self-respecting market maker would touch to find simple arbitrage opportunities when pools become imbalanced. There’s no way Wintermute would integrate with SwapMatic on Polygon, meaning you are free to arb away it’s $1,001 in liquidity.

Identity - Every single one of these identity solutions is asynchronous. Notice a pattern here? Whenever behaviors are asynchronous, notifications provide tons of value to the users. Basic Authentication could send an ephemeral notification which disappears in 30 seconds every time you log in. Attestations could do the same every time you attest to something. You could monitor certain names for specific activities(ie Sasha bridging USDN out of Waves) as well as getting notifications whenever someone uses you as a reference via proof of personhood

DAOs - A very simple solution would be push notifications to your email whenever a proposal that would be swayed by your voting power has 30 minutes left. You can then vote to change the outcome of that proposal if desired. Imagine how much more participation would/could happen here?

Crying wolf may have been the boy’s undoing, but the true irony was that the wolves were always lurking nearby

At the end of the day, there are many wolves around us that demand our attention. We should be discerning in how we allocate our attention, but the answer is never to ignore the wolves.

If you know who this wolf is, you should probably check out Yoz Labs