In April 2022, Push Protocol raised $10.1 million at a reported $131 million valuation (as per CoinDesk) to build the missing plumbing of web3: notifications for wallets and dapps. Four years on, that plumbing has delivered more than 140 million notifications to over 500,000 aggregate users (Push, December 2024), yet the project has effectively restarted itself a third time — abandoning notifications as its core bet to build an entire Layer-1 blockchain, Push Chain, that still has no mainnet, no live token and no launch date as of September 2026.
That gap between adoption numbers and monetisation is the story here. Push Protocol, born as the Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) in 2020, is not the same thing as “Push” the fiat on-ramp that Aave Labs runs in the UK and EU — a separate, unrelated product that happens to share a name. This piece is about the older Push: its founders, its funding, its token PUSH, and the untested bet it is now making on Push Chain.
Quick facts
| Company | Push Protocol (formerly Ethereum Push Notification Service / EPNS); evolving into Push Chain |
| Founded | August 2020, at the ETHGlobal HackMoney hackathon (Push, “Evolution of Push”, December 2024) |
| Founder(s) | Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi |
| Businesses | Web3 notifications, wallet-to-wallet chat and “Spaces” audio; now building Push Chain, a shared-state Layer-1 for “universal apps” |
| Latest FY revenue | Not disclosed — a decentralised protocol, not an incorporated company with audited accounts (see “The numbers”) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Not disclosed for the same reason |
| Listed | Private; not equity-listed. The PUSH token trades on exchanges including KuCoin, ZebPay and Quickswap (CoinGecko, accessed 23 September 2026) |
| Market value / last valuation | $131 million, reported at the April 2022 Series A (CoinDesk); PUSH token market cap $504,062 as of 23 September 2026 (CoinGecko) |
| Key leadership / team size | Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi, co-founders; 11–50 employees (Wellfound, accessed September 2026) |
What they do
Push Protocol runs the notification, chat and “Spaces” (live audio) layer that lets decentralised apps and wallets talk to their users the way a mobile app talks to a phone’s lock screen — an on-chain trigger (a loan about to be liquidated, a governance vote closing, an NFT sale) turns into a message a wallet holder actually sees, instead of something they’d otherwise only find by checking a block explorer. Its customers are dapp teams, DAOs and wallets — Aave, Unstoppable Domains and QuickSwap are among the roughly 450 projects the protocol says it has integrated (comms.push.org, accessed September 2026) — not the end users themselves, who receive the messages for free. Since late 2024 the same team has been redirecting most of its engineering effort into Push Chain, a new Layer-1 blockchain meant to let a single smart contract run across any chain and any wallet, rather than continuing to build only a messaging add-on for other people’s chains.
The origin
Harsh Rajat came to crypto after a decade in mobile and SaaS product work, including a self-directed sabbatical in 2014 spent exploring machine learning, AI and design before he moved into blockchain (cryptonews.com interview). Richa Joshi’s path ran through Deloitte, Wipro and Citibank before she joined Project Hydro, an open-source DeFi effort, where she cut her teeth on crypto product and community work (YourStory; WazirX blog). The two met the same problem from different angles: web3 had rebuilt money, lending and trading from scratch, but it had never rebuilt something as basic as a push notification. A wallet holder had no way of knowing, without manually checking, that their collateral was about to be liquidated or that a project they’d invested in had just moved. “Communication is a very primitive tool which has so many facets to it,” Rajat later said of the gap they set out to close (cryptonews.com). They built the first version at the ETHGlobal HackMoney hackathon in August 2020, under Ethereum Foundation guidance, and were picked for the Kernel Genesis cohort and ranked in the top three of Gitcoin’s Round 7 grants, drawing 214 individual contributors before any institutional money came in (Push, “Evolution of Push”, December 2024).
The struggle years
The company’s history is really three restarts wearing one continuous name.
- 2020–January 2022: built narrowly as the Ethereum Push Notification Service — a feature bolted onto Ethereum dapps, entirely dependent on other developers choosing to integrate it. By its January 2022 mainnet launch it had reached just 100 channels and roughly 60,000 subscribers (GlobeNewswire, September 2022).
- 27 September 2022: the team rebranded EPNS to Push Protocol, explicitly stripping “Ethereum,” “Notification” and “Service” from its own name — an admission that the original positioning had become a ceiling rather than an identity, as it pushed beyond Ethereum to other chains and beyond notifications to chat and audio (Push blog; CryptoSlate, September 2022).
- Through the same period, the token that funded and incentivised all of this fell from an all-time high of $8.73 to an all-time low of $0.00343 — a decline of more than 99.9% (CoinGecko, accessed 23 September 2026) — steadily eroding the purchasing power of a treasury denominated in its own currency.
- Late 2024: rather than iterate further on notifications, chat and Spaces, the Push community voted to redirect the project a second time — into building Push Chain, a full Layer-1 blockchain, effectively making the prior three years of product a legacy line while resources moved to an unproven new chain (The Block, 12 December 2024).
- 2025–2026: Push Chain’s testnet was guided to arrive in phases from mid-January 2025 with mainnet targeted for “later in 2025” (The Block, December 2024). As of the Season 3 update in April 2026, and confirmed on Push’s own homepage as of 23 September 2026, the chain remains in testnet with its native token unlaunched and no mainnet date announced — a slip of well over a year against the project’s own original timeline.
The turning point
If there is one event that separates the small Ethereum-only tool from the multi-chain company that could raise a Series A, it is 15 February 2022, when EPNS launched on BNB Chain. The PUSH token jumped 41% in the following 24 hours (CryptoSlate, February 2022) — the market’s read that a single-chain notification tool had just become a distribution bet across every ecosystem it touched. Rajat framed the move as getting “closer to its vision of onboarding one billion users to web3” (CryptoSlate). Two months later, Jump Crypto led the $10.1 million Series A at a $131 million valuation (CoinDesk; Decrypt, April 2022); five months after that, EPNS became Push Protocol. The BNB listing did not by itself make the company — but it is the point where the market started pricing Push as a multi-chain platform rather than a single-chain feature, and the fundraising and rebrand that followed both leaned on that repricing.
The money behind it
- 7 December 2020 — seed round, $750,000, led by LD Capital: the earliest institutional money, at a point when “web3 notifications” was not yet a recognised funding category (Inc42).
- 28 March 2021 — extended seed, $1.41 million, led by Momentum 6 with participation from Binance Labs, True Ventures, IOSG, LD Capital and BR Capital, plus angels including Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon co-founder) and Ajit Tripathi (then Aave’s head of institutional business): brought exchange- and DeFi-adjacent credibility ahead of the January 2022 mainnet launch (Push/Medium seed announcement; PR Newswire, 2021; Inc42).
- 13–14 April 2022 — Series A, $10.1 million, led by Jump Crypto with Tiger Global, ParaFi Capital, Sino Global Capital, Polygon Studios and Harmony Foundation participating, at a reported $131 million valuation: funded the push into BNB Chain, Polygon zkEVM and Arbitrum, and underwrote the September 2022 rebrand (CoinDesk; Decrypt; Yahoo Finance, April 2022).
That puts total disclosed funding at $12.26 million (₹117.7 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) across three rounds between December 2020 and April 2022 (Inc42). No new funding round has been publicly reported since the Series A — as of September 2026, $131 million remains the only reported valuation the company has ever carried, and it is now more than four years old.
How it makes money
The part people get wrong about Push is assuming it already works like a paid notification API — a web3 version of Firebase Cloud Messaging charging per message. It does not. Its economics have gone through three distinct designs, none of which currently produces material, disclosed protocol revenue.
- Original model (2020–2022): a dapp wanting to send notifications (“a channel”) deposited a stake into a common pool, which was put into Aave to earn yield; that yield was paid out to subscribers in proportion to how early they had joined the channel — a subsidised, growth-first design that moved money to users, not to the protocol (Push token-economics blog).
- Spam control, not revenue: closing a channel forfeits a small PUSH-denominated fee from the deposit, with the remainder refunded — a deterrent against gaming the system rather than a fee line (Push documentation).
- Push v2 “Fee Pool” (2023): introduced a one-time PUSH-token fee a user can require before a stranger’s chat request reaches their inbox — the first mechanism that captures a fee for a Push-native action, though it is opt-in and user-to-user rather than protocol-to-user (Push/Medium, “Push Protocol v2 — Fee Pool & Incentivized Chats”).
- The planned model (Push Chain, not yet live): gas fees paid in any origin chain’s native token get routed through a “Fee+Solver” contract, with a portion swapped and burned for Push Chain’s own token, while validators and stakers earn a share of network fees — a conventional Layer-1 fee-capture-and-burn design (Push, “Unlocking the Full Potential of Push”; Push Chain tokenomics blog).
In short: for nearly its entire life, Push has been a free public good for dapps, funded by its treasury and token appreciation rather than by users or by the protocols using it. The entire monetisation plan is now staked on Push Chain’s gas-fee model — which cannot be tested at scale until the chain it depends on actually launches.
The numbers
Push Protocol is a decentralised project, not an incorporated company; it does not file audited revenue or profit-and-loss statements, and none could be verified for this piece. In place of a conventional P&L, the table below tracks the verifiable funding, adoption and token metrics that exist across its history — each figure sourced and dated in place of an invented number.
| Period | Metric | Value | Source |
| December 2020 | Seed funding raised | $750,000 | Inc42 |
| By September 2022 | Cumulative notifications delivered | 100 million+ | GlobeNewswire, Sept 2022 |
| April 2022 | Series A raised / reported valuation | $10.1 million / $131 million | CoinDesk; Decrypt |
| By December 2024 | Cumulative notifications / aggregate users / integrated apps | 140 million+ / 500,000 / 500+ | Push, “Evolution of Push” |
| As of 23 September 2026 | PUSH token market cap / circulating supply | $504,062 / 90.24 million (of 100 million max) | CoinGecko |
| As of 23 September 2026 | PUSH price vs all-time high ($8.73) | down more than 99.9% | CoinGecko |
| As of 23 September 2026 | Push Chain status | testnet only; no mainnet date; native token not launched | Push.org homepage |
Where the money comes from
There is no revenue split to report, so the more honest question is where Push’s product and attention are split — and the surprise is that none of these lines currently charges a metered fee.
- Notifications: distributed across nine-plus networks including Ethereum, Polygon, Polygon zkEVM, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Fuse and Cyber — the original and still largest product line by integration count (Push docs; Alchemy dapp listing).
- Chat: wallet-to-wallet messaging with the opt-in Fee Pool for unsolicited requests — the only line with any live fee capture, and it is user-paid, not protocol-paid (Push/Medium, Fee Pool announcement).
- Spaces: live audio rooms pitched as a web3 alternative to Twitter/X Spaces, bundled into the same app rather than monetised separately (Push product documentation).
- Push Chain: the newest and, by the team’s own resourcing decisions since late 2024, now the primary line — but it is pre-revenue, pre-mainnet and pre-token as of September 2026 (Push.org; The Block).
- Ecosystem support: over $1 million distributed in grants to third-party builders on the protocol, a cost line rather than a revenue one (comms.push.org, accessed September 2026).
The risks
- A token that has lost its war chest. PUSH trades more than 99.9% below its all-time high of $8.73, at a market cap of roughly $504,000 with thin daily volume (CoinGecko; OneKey, May 2026) — leaving little native-currency cushion to fund grants, incentives or a token migration without heavy dilution.
- Execution risk on a much harder build. A shared-state Layer-1 is, in the words of one independent analysis, “technically hard and capital intensive” (OneKey, May 2026); Push’s own timeline has already slipped from a “later in 2025” mainnet target (The Block, December 2024) to an unresolved testnet as of September 2026.
- An unresolved, contested migration. Governance discussions around moving existing PUSH holders onto the new Push Chain token have floated a 1:15 conversion ratio, down from an earlier informally discussed proportional framing near 1:100; some long-time holders on governance forums call this dilution of their stake, a characterisation the Push team disputes (OneKey, May 2026). Terms remain unresolved, which is itself an overhang on any relaunch.
- A crowded, still-unpaid category. XMTP, WalletConnect’s Web3Inbox and Notifi all offer overlapping wallet notification or messaging functionality, and none of them — Push included — has yet turned “web3 notifications” into a category with a defensible, metered price (industry sourcing: WalletConnect, XMTP, Notifi product pages).
The takeaway
Push spent four years proving that infrastructure can win integrations, grants and even a $131 million valuation while never charging the people who use it a fee — 140 million notifications and 500,000 users is a real number, and it did not require Push to solve the harder problem of getting paid. The lesson generalises beyond one protocol: building the pipes is often the easy half of an infrastructure business; building the toll booth — a fee model people will actually pay, without breaking the adoption you spent years earning — is the half that gets deferred, and deferred, until an entire second company (in this case, an entire second blockchain) has to be built just to finally attempt it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Push Protocol the same company as “Push” from Aave Labs?
No. Push Protocol (formerly EPNS, founded 2020 by Harsh Rajat and Richa Joshi) is a web3 communication protocol with its own PUSH token. “Push” by Aave Labs is an unrelated fiat on/off-ramp product that has separately received UK FCA and EU MiCAR authorisation in 2025–2026 (Aave blog; FFNews). The two share a name and nothing else.
What happened to EPNS?
EPNS, the Ethereum Push Notification Service, rebranded to Push Protocol on 27 September 2022 to reflect its move beyond Ethereum to other chains and beyond notifications to chat and audio (Push blog; CryptoSlate).
What is Push Chain, and has it launched?
Push Chain is a shared-state Layer-1 blockchain the Push community voted to build in late 2024, intended to let one smart contract serve users on any chain with any wallet. As of 23 September 2026 it remains in testnet, with its native token unlaunched and no mainnet date announced (Push.org; The Block).
How much has Push Protocol raised, and from whom?
A reported $12.26 million across three rounds: a $750,000 seed (December 2020, led by LD Capital), a $1.41 million extended seed (March 2021, led by Momentum 6), and a $10.1 million Series A (April 2022, led by Jump Crypto) at a reported $131 million valuation (Inc42; CoinDesk; Decrypt).
Why has the PUSH token fallen so much in price?
PUSH has fallen more than 99.9% from its all-time high of $8.73 to roughly $0.0056 as of 23 September 2026 (CoinGecko), tracking a broad decline across small-cap web3 infrastructure tokens together with uncertainty over Push’s pending migration to a new Push Chain token, whose terms remain contested in governance forums (OneKey, May 2026).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Push, “Evolution of Push,” push.org blog, December 2024
- Push, “Season 3 Early Access is Live!,” push.org blog, April 2026
- Push, push.org homepage, accessed September 2026
- Push, “Introducing Push Chain Tokenomics,” push.org blog, March 2025
- Push/Medium, “$PUSH Token Economics” and “Unlocking the Full Potential of Push,” Push Protocol Medium blog
- Push/Medium, “Push Protocol v2 — Fee Pool & Incentivized Chats,” Push Protocol Medium blog, 2023
- GlobeNewswire, “EPNS Pushes Forward with Rebrand as it Reshapes Web3 Architecture,” September 2022
- CryptoSlate, “EPNS rebrands to Push Protocol as it moves to a multi-chain future,” September 2022
- CryptoSlate, “PUSH jumps 41% as Push Protocol (EPNS) launches on BNB chain,” February 2022
- CoinDesk, “Ethereum Push Notification Service Raises $10M at $131M Valuation,” April 2022
- Decrypt, “Ethereum Push Notification Service Raises $10.1 Million in Series A,” April 2022
- Yahoo Finance, “Ethereum Push Notification Service Raises $10M at $131M Valuation,” April 2022
- Inc42, “Push Protocol — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
- PR Newswire, “EPNS, Decentralized Notification Protocol, Raises $1.41 Million in Seed Funding,” 2021
- CoinGecko, Push Protocol (PUSH) token page, accessed 23 September 2026
- The Block, “Web3 notifications protocol Push to launch its own Layer 1 chain,” December 2024
- OneKey, “PUSH Deep Dive: Token Fundamentals, Recent Developments, and Outlook,” updated May 2026
- Cryptonews.com, “Harsh Rajat, Co-Founder of Push Protocol, on Creating a Web3 Communication Network, and AI,” Ep. 236
- YourStory, Richa Joshi profile; WazirX blog, “Highlights from #HumansOfCrypto: Richa Joshi”
- Wellfound, Push Protocol company page, accessed September 2026
- comms.push.org homepage, accessed September 2026
- Aave, “DeFi for Fintechs” blog; FFNews, “Push by Aave Labs Receives FCA Approval,” 2026 (for disambiguation only)
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