FAQ

Isn't putting content onchain expensive?

See Gas Costs for more information - blockspace is pretty cheap already, and only getting cheaper.

There's a protocol fee switch with no timelock on the governance contract. Isn't this a risk of frontrunning transactions with fee changes on short notice?

This is a temporary tradeoff for the simplicity of the ECP contracts. We will publicly announce any fee increases at least 48 hours in advance. We plan to transfer the protocol ownership to a Governor contract that will have appropriate timelocks on protocol settings.

Is there a way to delete channel?

No, but you can freeze the channel from receiving new comments by sending the channel NFT to the zero address, or setting a hook for the channel that reverts on every hook call.

Why is there a fee to create a channel?

We want to initially prevent too many low quality channels from being created. We may remove this fee in the future.

Is there a fee to create comments?

The comment fee is controlled by a protocol fee switch, similar to the channel creation fee. This allows the protocol to collect a small fee on each comment to support ongoing development and maintenance. The fee can be adjusted by governance, and any excess fees beyond the protocol's share are passed to the channel's hook contract if one is set. There is currently no fee to create comments, and the plan is to not have a fee, unless hooks monetize entirely through non-ETH fees, in which case a small fee similar to the gas fee per comment may be the most viable way to sustain the protocol.

Are your contracts upgradeable?

No, we want to minimize the need for developers to maintain the infrastructure to keep their apps and integrations running.

Are there ECP profiles? What about other social primitives like follows?

No, that's the role of another protocol. We don't want apps to have to choose between the user experience costs of onboarding users to a new profile and getting the benefits of onchain composability. We recommend using ENS for profiles, and EFP for follows

Will ECP be available on my favorite EVM chain?

If there's enough interest from developers we are open to adding support for new chains, please reach out to us.

Will ECP build an App to compete with my App built on ECP?

We want to avoid misalignment and competition between the ECP protocol team and potential integrators. We may build apps in the future to try to help drive the growth of ECP, but our current approach is focused on aligning other builders to build on ECP, and avoiding building a traditional social super app.

Is there a way to quickly deploy signer api?

Yes, we have a Signer API Service that you can deploy to your own infrastructure.

Any limitations?

Yes. We have made the following tradeoffs with the contract design:

Hooks are responsible for refunding any excess value sent to them.
Hooks are not permissioned and you should only interact with hooks you trust.
Paymasters can be tricked into signing messages that they did not intend to be considered authors of.
Hooks are allowed to re-enter the CommentManager to post/edit/delete comments in the same transaction, so as to reply, for example.
Channels names, descriptions and Comment contents can be really long, beyond what is reasonable for an app to index or display.
Channels can change their hooks, frontrunning users posting to them. This can be mitigated by transferring ownership of the channel to a contract that implements a timelock.
Protocol parameters can be changed at a moments notice, frontrunning users. This will be mitigated by transferring ownership of the protocol contracts to a governance contract with timelocks.
Long deadlines can be exploited to delay sharing a comment
Deduplication of identical comments by the same author should be done via using a different deadline for each comment.
Metadata is limited to 1000 items to prevent gas-DOS attacks.
An approval gives the app the permission to delete comments, including comments posted by another app for this user.