Beyond putting content onchain, ECP enables new kinds of social apps via hooks, allowing communities and apps to gate who can post, charge fees, reward creators, create attention markets, create collectibles, and more, by setting their hooks smart contract, or by choosing from one from the growing library of community-created hooks.

You can try ECP live today in Interface, the first app to integrate ECP.

Build with us at ethcomments.xyz

Our Purpose

Until today, builders have faced two options for building social features: either store content in their private cloud database, where other apps can't access it and it can be taken offline, or integrate a full-stack web3 social protocol, which requires educating users about that protocol, creating separate profiles, paying for those profiles, and maintaining the integration through updates and changes.

ECP offers an alternative path for crypto builders who want to harness the interoperability, guarantees, and composability of blockchains, without the tradeoffs of a full stack social protocol.

ECP makes the following design choices

• Incrementally adoptable: Apps can integrate just what they need without buying into an entire vertically integrated identity, content, social ecosystem (No lock in) - just comments + reactions

• Credibly neutral: no first party app with privileged protocol and user base access

• User-invisible infrastructure: The protocol operates as infrastructure, not as a branded network that needs to be educated and evangelised to the end user

• 100% open source & MIT licensed: No proprietary components or privileged access, nor first party closed source apps.

• Unopinionated, Permissionless & Stable APIs: Our smart contracts aren’t upgradeable. We can’t break your app or force you to refactor your app every couple of months to keep it from breaking. The content is stored directly onchain, for any developer to permissionlessly build on.

• Built on Ethereum standards: Leveraging existing ecosystem tools rather than recreating them - use with ethereum accounts.

• Virtually free (subcent fees to post on L2s): With the advent of low-cost L2s and L3s, on-chain social features are now economically viable in ways they simply weren't before. Posting a comment on Base via ECP costs approximately a half of a cent — and some chains subsidise gas fees entirely, enabling free, gas sponsored experiences for users.

• Uncompromising UX: Users can give your app an approval to post on their behalf, at which point the onchain component becomes invisible via gas sponsored transactions.

Why should an app use ECP and put comments onchain, instead of using offchain, cheap, simple and readily available solutions?

There are several compelling reasons for apps to implement onchain comments via ECP over traditional methods:

1. Interoperability and data portability - Comments become part of the permanent, open record of Ethereum, allowing any application to access and display them without permission. This enables cross-platform discussions and prevents vendor lock-in.

2. Verifiable authenticity - Onchain comments are cryptographically signed, providing proof of who wrote what and when. This is valuable for reviews, feedback, and discussions where authenticity matters.

3. Composability - Comments can be programmatically referenced by other smart contracts and applications, enabling new use cases like incentivized engagement, moderation mechanisms, and reputation systems. Third party apps and services can provide distribution, spam algorithms or other infrastructure that the ethereum stack.

4. Censorship resistance & Permissionlessness - While apps can moderate their own interfaces, the underlying comment data remains accessible on chain, preventing permanent censorship or loss of user-generated content.

5. Future-proof - As the web3 ecosystem evolves, having comments onchain ensures they remain accessible even if individual applications shut down. Users retain ownership of their contributions.

How ECP Fits Into the Bigger Picture

ECP is one piece of what could become a more comprehensive set of social building blocks, each focused on doing one thing well rather than trying to be an all-in-one solution. Smaller, more atomic protocols give developers the choice to compose these elements as needed, choosing from available primitives that suit their needs — . Here are some examples of social primitives on ethereum that can be used with ECP

• Authentication: SIWE for seamless web3 login

• Identity: ENS for user profiles

• Follows: Ethereum Follow Protocol for social connections

• Messaging: XMTP for direct communication

• Comments: ECP for threaded discussions

• …many more onchain social protocol primitives that are don’t exist yet

Integration

ECP is 100% MIT licensed open source, the contracts are immutable, and is live on Base today.

We’re building the best open source toolkit for building on ECP - from indexers to SDKs to React components, to make it as easy as possible to get started building on ECP. Get started today at docs.ethcomments.xyz. We also have a no code option for embedding ECP powered comments sections into websites and blogs that you can find here.

What’s next?

We're talking with key ecosystem players about integrating ECP into their applications. If you're building an application or ecosystem that wants to put content onchain, we'd love to hear from you.

Next steps

Start building on ECP →

Add an ECP comments section to your website or blog →

Try ECP →

Follow us on X →

Docs →

Reach out to us on telegram or XMTP →

there's another version of this blog post onchain on ECP here https://ecp-eth.github.io/md/?commentId=0xdd7c50da20ea91fbda7e9868ed880bf933d3d22eef8ff12667e1d6c96ef3ddb7&chainId=8453

ethcomments.xyz

You could try talking about your product a whole lot - on twitter, in person, wherever, whenever.

But that is slow, and everyone shills their own product, even if it's bad, so people don't trust that the recommendation is authentic. It's a weak signal.

Some products, entirely through authentic usage generate mentions on other products, using their audiences to grow. This can create a fast flywheel where some people use your product, and by doing so bring in 2 more people to use your product, and each of these in turn brings two more people, just by using your product naturally.

great user driven customer acquisition can bring about

NFTs are a great example. Someone mints your NFT, and it shows up on their profile across web3 apps, on Farcaster.xyz new NFT mints, on Interface.social and if enough people mint, it shows up on mint.fun and icy.tools for people trying to spot trends to mint - that's where you want to be.

Everyone is using NFT free mints to ride this wave - but that won't last forever, as more and more brands try to use that growth strategy. It's also not the best way to communicate what your product does, or why it's great.

The best embedded growth strategies teach new users how to use your product and why it's valuable.

Here are some examples that come to mind

Charts like those from dune.com that are easy to share on websites, discords, twitter, ...

Allowlist sharing, like these by bello.lol

Launchcaster.xyz "like to mint" and @launch bots across platforms

Interactions via social bots, like @readwise save

Login with Unstoppable domains

Showtime.xyz 's Pre-Save on spotify to mint

NF.TD as profile homepages that replace linktree in twitter bios

There are many more examples and opportunities out there for web3 projects to embed themselves across the web to grow their reach, and finding a great way to do it can change the fundamentals of your project.

For only apps (no web), “get<X>” or other domains are fine imo, which solves alot of the problems. For B2B shortness of name is not as important.

• must have a close enough vibe for the company

• must not have a trademark in US that is sufficiently similar company (internet services that could be mistaken for this…)

• must not have an existing household name company with this name (“kia” etc)

• must not have bad connotations in english or spanish - other languages don’t matter (”shitr”)

• domain must be reasonably affordable (<1K)

• domain must not need to be purchased through a negotiation process (too slow/pricey)

• must be 6 or less characters before domain, name can only be longer if it uses the TLD in the name (ex: cash.app). 8 letters max could be acceptable for the right name.

• must be one of .xyz/.io/.com/.co/.app/.so TLDs or in rare case another short weird TLD like .ma if used as a domain hack thats part of the name. Preferably .xyz for crypto as most likely of those to be available, and not esoteric

• must be credible spelling as an english word (no weird spellings lyrt etc)

• must be pronounceable and clearly spellable from saying it without spelling it (shouldn’t be a misspelling of another word)

• not (english word + ly) (that 2010 naming meta is over and I’m over it)

Name Candidates

names that are related to feeds:

• freeds.xyz

• freed

• lifeed

• ofeed

• unfeed

• feedcaster.xyz

• feedmix.app

• feid.xyz

• feed.top (657)

• feeg.xyz

• fefe.xyz

• fede.xyz (looks like a typo of feed)

• openfeed

farcaster specific names

• cast.dog

• recast

• feedcaster

• cast.tools

• notbird.app

• fc.so

• zencast.app

• upcast

• castscan.xyz

• farcaster.pro

• caster

• castle

• cast.sh (250$)

names not related to feeds

• surf

• isaka.xyz isaca?

• lide.xyz lyde?

• community gardens metaphor (as opposed to walled gardens) - gardens.xyz

• dakoro.xyz

• ray

• yuma.xyz (yooma?)

• tune?

• fave.xyz($3K/yr)

• hubs.xyz($300/yr)

• zota.xyz

• tope

• topi

• zila (zilla?)

• grove.app ($700) branch fork, … - grow + love

• .garden TLD?

• sand.bar

• cove

• ah

• coca (cocoa)

• oh.xyz

• pica.xyz

• rine (rhine/rine)

• kine https://twitter.com/KineProtocol?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

• leme (lame?) (leem?) “le-me” “lemmy”

• radar

• hide.xyz (700/yr)

• nip.xyz

• nid.xyz

• shh.xyz

• heh.xyz

• fub.xyz

• beam

• firecard.xyz

• fey.xyz

• wave

• best

• zob.xyz

• line

• grove.app (750$) - https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4804:xv3t01.4.11

• juby.xyz

• cove.top

• topa.xyz($)

• zumo.xyz($) -could be mistaken for ‘sumo’

• kona.xyz($$)

• kune.xyz($)

• feta.xyz($$$)

• riva.xyz($$)

• guma.xyz (gooma?)

• frida

• slice

• tada.xyz

• wade.xyz (350$/yr)

• seeds

• discove.xyz ($10) / discove.app (discover + cove + discord + discourse)

• spade (gardening)

• fork (gardening) “feed you with my fork”. you’ve been spoon fed your feed for too long. It’s time to fork. Forks used for making digital gardens

• some($$$)

• ade.xyz - mistake for aid ?

• eed.xyz

• saber/ lightsaber

• ike.xyz

• nid.xyz

• hose

• babo.xyz

• camo.xyz

• the.co.ve

Core differentiators

• users are in control of their feeds; what they want to see; the addictiveness of them, the clickbaitiness, …

  • this is all premised on the ability to fork

  • like a wand or lightsaber

Tools

https://domainr.com/to.pa?q=topa

https://iwantmyname.com/?domain=topa

https://dan.com/buy-domain/grove.app

For .XYZ: Download available domains by length here: https://gen.xyz/premiums

https://instantdomainsearch.com/domain/extensions?q=cove

Archive

TOPA: https://twitter.com/topa1one https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:y365e.2.6 is probably a non starter due to trademark issues

Names I love

• linear

• cash app

• luma

Migrating later

so if a great choice isn’t available, it’s possible to move later. Here I would suppose that it’s much easier to change a domain than a name (and domain). So the name matters more.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Discove will be participating in a16z Crypto Startup School.

This initial funding and support will help me realize the best version of Discove and hopefully also contribute to Farcaster's growth.

Discove is hiring a senior react-native engineer and a senior backend engineer to join me on this adventure, and referrals or shares are appreciated 💜

David from Discove

david@discove.xyz

Since I've just starting working on discove.xyz, I need all the magical SEO points I can get. So if I link a bunch here, it might help discove.xyz rank better on all the google searches that I currently rank for. For example discove is currently on the first page of google results for many searches like "vbuterin farcaster" or "vgr farcaster".

The remainder of this article is not worth reading, and created entirely to get more magical SEO points 🪄

Discove.xyz is the best way to discover and explore farcaster. Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network.

Some of the best people to follow on farcaster through discove are

vbuterin on farcaster

dwr (dan romero) on farcaster

vgr on farcaster

The best way to get a farcaster invite is to message @dwr on twitter and in my opinion to be someone who generally posts high quality content or non spammy content, even if it's not necessarily popular.

Farcaster vs Lens

Here's my take. Lens is a decentralized social network that runs on the polygon blockchain. Many actions like following on Lens are actually NFTs and the transaction fee of performing said actions by users is covered by the Lens team. Farcaster on the other hand is a sufficiently decentralized social network where usernames will be on the Ethereum blockchain, but the content posted by participants of the network will be stored in a decentralized technology being developed by the Farcaster team called Hubs. This technology is based on CRDTs, is not a blockchain and is in part optimized for minimizing the cost to someone of running a Hub. In Farcaster, people's posts, called casts are signed with their private key to provide a proof of authenticity, and synced between Hubs eventually, without requiring strict ordering of transactions of events like a blockchain typically does. This allows Hubs to support a higher throughput without sacrificing decentralization or security, when compared to non-parallelized blockchain alternatives.

Scams in crypto are rampant. (Scammers around the world took home a record $14 billion in cryptocurrency in 2021)

We can group virtually all scams into four categories:

1. Transactions where you don’t get what you expect, such as buying a fake product or signing a malicious signature that drains your wallet.

2. Having your secret keys stolen (by getting malicious code into your device or convincing you to send them)

3. Projects that don’t deliver what they promise (through misdirection, deception or rug pulls)

4. Security flaws in smart contracts or other code

The only problem I’ll look at here is category 1.

Problem Category 1: Phishing; Transactions where you don’t get what you expect (buying a fake product or signing a malicious signature that drains your wallet via setApprovalForAll or other)

• Sub-Problem: Impersonating twitter/opensea/ENS/domains/discord users/…. via similar usernames or homoglyph attack

  • Solutions:

    • S1. Some sort of endorsement of the real thing from trusted source(s) via wallet/browser/extension

      • S1.1 Single “verified” or “not verified” protocol that is governed by a dao. This is kinda like a whitelist approach

        • Metacert was/is kinda trying to do this

        • The non DAO, centralized version of this is twitter blue checkmark and opensea verifications

        • The current versions keep the bar really high (very popular projects only) - however it might be sufficient to verify something is not an impersonation or close homonym of a well known project or better known project.

        • Problems with solution:

          • Centralized kinda “one truth” you either follow this protocol’s list or not.

          • Aligning token incentives could be tricky to prevent a 51% attack

          • Delegating trust to this list

          • verification can be subjective, and context dependent. A blue checkmark really needs a context, particularly for popular names like John Smith. Twitter adds additional context on the page of verified elected officials

        • Considerations

          • needs to prevent verification being continued across renames (requires reverification)

        • Nice parts of the solution:

          • if the rules for entry are objective, it’s really simple

          • easily understandable by end users

      • S1.2 Token curated registries: lists that are governed by DAOs with tokenomics

        • Examples

          • Uniswap lists

          • Kleros TCR

        • Problems with current solutions:

          • There is no financial reward to add to the list in Kleros’s case, and you have to risk tokens in order to submit to the list. Bad tokenomics. There is a reward for jurors paid by the submission. So it relies on lists where people want to be on it - and want to pay to be on it. Which is only some lists.

          • Is sort of a “solution in search of a problem” if you build a general TCR tool like Kleros has (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6e-how-to-evaluate-startup-ideas). A general and broad tool not really being used for a specific, painful problem. Hard to grow because it's hard to explain and brand.

          • It’s hard to monetize list access. So who pays? how? Submitters to list? → Why would they pay to make the list better? Consumers of the list? Hard to get get adoption then - how do you moderate a list that costs to consume? If nobody pays ⇒ no tokenomics that drives list quality. Could charge for access to a more up to date list (day old list costs X, very fast list Y). But if your consumers are wallets, platforms etc are you charging per user or per company? May be difficult to get adoption if you don’t maintain the lists but are trying to sell them.

          • I believe the future looks less like: “everyone trusts a single TCR with the truth on a matter such as is address X the real thing or not” and more like “theres a couple organizations I trust, and they maintain lists, not necessary TCR ones that help me give choose towards whether I believe X is the real thing or not”. Lists will be derived from applications/be part of applications that have monetizable models, such as reddit communities curating lists of subject specific content and being rewarded from ad revenue.

        • Nice parts of the solution:

          • Not a single “believe us” - but you choose who to trust. There is a market for good lists

      • S1.3 Trust graphs - you trust X and X says that Y is the real one, so you can trust Y. This with many parties you trust can create multiple trust chains to a certain place. This is sort of where decentralized credentials, soul bound tokens are going. You choose a couple trust starting points (maybe influenced by your friend, your browser or your wallet), and then build out a trust graph from there. Tools to discover new trust points are still going to have the issue of moderating against impersonators.

        • Trust network based search engine

        • This is the most promising and exciting opportunity in my mind.

    • S2. Blacklists, whitelists and fuzzy matching from whitelists

      • Current solution being used by phishfort, metamask, and others.

        • Problems with solution:

          • blacklists are too slow (reactionary) - many scams last minutes and spin up fast

          • phishfort services for wallets are paid services

          • centralized parties managing the lists mean opaque processes you need to trust

    • S3. Only browse the web from trusted links (unrealistic)

    • S4. A search/browser engine that only gives you the real thing. This needs to be the starting point for any web3 search, such as the default wallet search engine.

      • Problems:

        • Still have the problems with third parties

        • Centralized censorship

    • S5. Bringing in social context by users or contract holders verifying ownership over domains, social accounts and other credibility giving assets. Possibly an extension of ENS or leveraging it

      A version of this: https://galligan.xyz/blog/ens-proof-of-control

      • Problems:

        • Can impersonate people on twitter, can have huge following of bots on social networks. Needs a form of “trust graph” based proof of realness or other

    • S6. Displaying contract metadata, such as contract age or total transactions as a heuristic for the user

      • Problems:

        • Floor price, total transactions, total volume, contract age are not sybil resitant. Total transactions does have some cost associated to attacking it though.

• Sub-Problem: Malicious signatures/transactions, such as “setApprovalForAll” that is called unbeknownst to the end user

  • Solutions:

    • S1. EIP-712: legible signatures + wallet signature UX that makes it safer

    • S2. Wallet warning on malicious contracts from a list

    • S3. Some sort of endorsement from trusted source(s) via wallet/browser/extension

    • S4. Transaction simulation + Wallet UX communicating dangers

      • Problems:

        • Transactions that are only harmful when front-run by the attacker

        • Currently uses centralized services for this (blocknative/tenderly) - can we done via a node but probably needs a backend where transactions are sent previously which isn’t particularly privacy friendly nor anti MEV bot friendly

        • It's really hard to get distribution on a 3rd party browser extension that just does transaction simulation. You really have to build this into the default wallet behaviour, and wallets will likely build this. Metamask snaps might make this possible soon, but most users are unlikely to install 3rd party wallet extensions for a while. There are also RPCs that do transaction simulation.

    • S5. Wallet UX & Community consensus to only interact with source code verified contracts via sourcify eth or other protocol - and automatic classification of contracts and their functions into whether they could possibly call setApprovalForAll