Cracking the Notification Conundrum in Web 3 Apps

Ping! You’ve got mail. This is one of the oldest memes of the internet age. The little icon in the corner of our screens, the talking paper clip, the familiar buzz of the phone in our pockets. We take real-time alerts and notifications for granted. They are hard-wired into our everyday lives. And when an app does not provide notifications and alerts, it feels outdated.
But in the most modern iteration of the internet – Web 3 and blockchains – these notifications are conspicuous by their absence. The reason for this is largely technical. Push notifications are difficult to implement on the vast majority of blockchains and appear on almost no Web 3 apps. Some do exist for Ethereum as separate apps such as EPNS and Anyblock. But these are separate services, not available as built-in features to other apps and not available as developer tools.
Some blockchain development platforms do allow users to set up webhooks for Ethereum. But these are very complicated to implement, and users must set up multiple alerts for every event they would like to monitor. For most other blockchains, they’re virtually non-existent because they’re so difficult to implement for most developers. It would take days or weeks of development time to set up alerts for just one additional blockchain. In crypto time, this is just not feasible.
Looked at another way, notifications are the ultimate expression of the centralized internet. Vast platforms monitor everything going on and send out little messages to let their users know what’s happening with their own accounts. For this to be transposed over to the decentralized internet of Web 3 is not just a technical challenge – it also requires a change of mindset.
Notification station
Enter Notification Station, a new, simple and effective way to implement push notifications into Web 3 apps, created by blockchain development platform Tatum – for 10 blockchains and counting.
With just a few lines of code and one simple API call, users can monitor any address for incoming and outgoing transactions of any cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFT) or any other blockchain asset. Developers can set up push notifications within their own apps quickly and easily for multiple blockchains, without having to learn to code for each individual blockchain.
The feature is currently available on 10 blockchains and will soon be expanded to over 50 more. So far, these include Ethereum, Polygon, Celo, Solana, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Terra Luna and Klaytn.
Notification Station brings numerous advantages to users, not least in the time saved by not refreshing apps waiting to see if a transaction has dropped. Most importantly, there is no complex filtering or setting up multiple webhook notifications – one API call is all that’s needed to monitor all transactions at any address.
For developers of new and existing projects, having the capacity to add notifications to their platform radically improves the user experience because it allows them to alert all their apps’ end users about any transactions to or from their wallets. As soon as they receive an NFT or any crypto, they’ll know. Indeed, Notification Station is the ideal developer tool for building user-friendly and intuitive blockchain apps.
With Notification Station, the age of silence is over. The efficiency that comes from knowing in real time that a transaction has taken place is another important step in bringing Web 3 apps to a mainstream audience. Harnessing an efficiency tool emblematic of the centralized internet, for use in decentralized internet, allows the best of both worlds to come together.