One impossible challenge in decentralized finance is delivering critical Web3 notifications. Traditional finance has long solved this problem, so getting a debit or credit alert from your bank or new products in stock from your favourite e-commerce store is the norm.

The story is quite different for DeFi activities. There are next to zero emails or push notifications for liquidations, governance polls, NFT sales, listings, bids, and price actions – from businesses or projects to users or in-dApp messaging notifications.

Hermes Protocol solves this challenge by building communication links to bridge the gap between businesses, projects and users. Best part? Hermes Protocol is building on Radix. To better understand why we tag this as “the best part”, check out Grant’s article on Radix here.

What is Hermes Protocol?

Sérgio Rebelo, also known as Chinoman10, founder of Hermes Protocol puts it this way, “(Hermes Protocol is) the infrastructure that lets projects, users and businesses communicate while respecting users’ privacy.” I couldn’t have said it better.

The Hermes Protocol team is building a three-way communication structure that facilitates seamless blockchain-2-user, user-2-user and project-2-user interaction without jeopardizing users’ privacy. By establishing a trusted communication bridge between Web3 businesses and users, Hermes Protocol enables personalized alerts and marketing campaigns that drive engagement and foster a sense of community in the crypto ecosystem.

The team launched its Beta web app in September last year, allowing users to manage their previously created custom alerts and create new ones for relevant on-chain events directly into Discord. This brings us to the core offering of Hermes Protocol.

Notifications

Hermes Protocol prides itself on delivering critical Web3 notifications to users via their preferred social channels and wallets. How else are you supposed to keep up with activities happening on and off-chain with the protocol? 

Current notifications include:

• Governance Alerts for chain proposals and DAOs
• Whale-watching alert, so you know when any wallet does something huge on-chain
• NFT monitoring alerts let you be the first to know every time any NFT gets sold, listed or delisted. This way, you’d be well-positioned to snipe whatever listing lowers a collection’s floor price
• Price alerts for your favourite token pairs on any DEX
• Domain Notifications (registrations, changes, expiration warnings, etc.)
• Staking Alerts so you’re in the known when a whale makes a large deposit or withdrawal from the same Liquidity Pools as you, or even just to know when your unstaked tokens are made available
• Lastly, the Validator alerts. These help you stay in the know when a validator changes their name, description, commission rate or even when they get out of the active set or have downtime (redelegate before slashing happens).

For all the goodies it offers, Hermes Protocol is completely free for users and gets development support from tokens staked with their validators. You can support the protocol by staking here. Bonus tip: a future airdrop is planned for every staker and it’s proportional to the time and size, so make sure you get in as soon as possible with your largest bags.

Recently, the team launched custom notifications for businesses that span on-chain event alerts, transactional notifications, and broadcast communications, helping businesses improve user engagement. See details of these communications here: https://hermesprotocol.io/business. 

Radix for backbone infrastructure — a smart choice

I’m particularly excited the Hermes Protocol team is building on Radix, given the many benefits of Radix to DeFi projects. Since privacy is a big deal for Hermes Protocol, Radix rust-based Scrypto smart contract language and native support for assets ensure utmost security in communication among projects, businesses and users. 

When dealing with ‘notifications’, you need ‘fast’ — no, you need ‘pretty damn fast’ cloud infrastructure to make it happen. At 2²⁵⁶ shards (1.158e+77) for processing speed, more than any other L1, Radix is pretty damn fast and highly accessible.

It’s also easier and faster to scale a protocol like Hermes Protocol on Radix, given the network’s Cerberus consensus mechanism combined with sharding and atomic composability. 

Next on the Roadmap

There’s much more in store for users as the Hermes Protocol ecosystem evolves. Having rolled out the history and discord explorer feature, there are plans in place to roll out the P2P barter trader and W2W encrypted crosschain messaging features in the coming months:

• History Feature: This lets you see all your previous notifications in case you need data from a past transaction or activity to inform current decisions better.

• Discord Explorer: This feature allows users to get a full blockchain explorer experience through the convenience of slash commands without having to leave Discord. Plans are also in place to bring the same experience to the Telegram community.

Features to come

• Peer-2-Peer Barter Trader: An exciting feature allowing users to execute over-the-counter (OTC) deals without needing to trust third parties. The feature will be released on the regular webapp on Cosmos and Radix in Q3 2023.

• Wallet-to-Wallet encrypted cross-chain messaging will facilitate private, end-to-end communication between users across multiple chains.

• While some new notifications have been introduced, such as:

• Liquidity Change notification for deposits and withdrawals. These alerts help notify LPs of changes in the pools where they’ve deployed liquidity. You could look at it as a prompt that notifies LPs about significant whale activity in a pool.

• Other notification additions are still on their way i.e:

• Liquidity Staking Notifications for deposits, queued unbonding and unbonding started and finished
• Domain notifications for new domains you register, renewals, changed or expired domains

Explore the full roadmap here.

Conclusion

Hermes is fulfilling a critical need for DeFi users, and making it 100% free. It only gets better from here and worth keeping an eye on. You can explore further by interacting with the dApp and joining the communities on Discord and Telegram.