socialsub

Introduction

Socialsub is a public infrastructure for creating and managing on-chain subscription payments with ERC-20 tokens on Base. The protocol is built on top of EES (Ethereum Execution Service). to obtain censorship-resistant and reliable time-based automation of payments with great UX properties. It enables anyone to set up a recurring payment of any ERC-20 token, running automatically without intermediaries.

A cross-application standard

Socialsub aims to become the standard for applications using peer-to-peer (P2P) subscriptions. By leveraging a single contract, users’ subscriptions persist across multiple applications. This interoperability provides significant benefits. For example, content creators can restrict access to their content across various social media platforms based on a single subscription. Additionally, since Socialsub’s subscriptions are entirely on-chain, creators can enforce rights on the contract level. For instance, all subscribers paying 5 USDC or more per month could automatically be eligible to mint an exclusive NFT.

To achieve such a standard Socialsub comes with the following properties:

• Permissionless: Anyone can create a subscription with Socialsub from their own wallet.

• Censorship resistant: Payment processing is decentralized, meaning that it only requires a single honest participant to take the fee and process the payment. It is thus impossible to censor any payment in practice.

• Immutable: Socialsub's contract and the underlying EES contracts are completely immutable. This means that no one has control to alter or take down users' subscriptions.

• Reliable: With decentralized execution powered by EES, there are no central points of failure. With many independent and incentivized payment processors monitoring, this model results in ultra-reliable payments.

• 100% on-chain: All subscriptions are on-chain and the coordination of execution via EES is also completely on-chain. The dedication to transparency means that zero trust assumptions are necessary.

• Great UX: Execution fees can be paid in any ERC-20 token (e.g. the same as the payment token) and do not require any token lockups. The tokens flow directly from the sender's address to the recipient's address, neither party has to do anything after the subscription has been created.

• Public good: Socialsub does not charge any additional fees. The user only has to pay the execution fee to the EES network.

Socialsub believes that all of these properties are necessary for a scalable and web3-aligned standard.

Differences to other on-chain solutions

There are several key differences in how Socialsub tackles the subscription problem compared to previous solutions.

Token streaming

Socialsub's model is more similar to the subscription model in the traditional sense, a bulk sum is transferred in a fixed interval. The main problem with token streaming is that it requires the user to lock up tokens and make sure their locked balance is sufficient. Furthermore, it requires the receiver to actively withdraw their tokens from the pool. Thus, streaming still poses big UX challenges.

Signature based execution

While signature-based solutions offer good UX, they depend on off-chain coordination, often controlled by a single application or company, leading to trust concerns. Even decentralized execution layers still rely on off-chain elements, which reduces the security guarantees compared to fully on-chain systems, hence why Socialsub builds on EES which has fully on-chain coordination and transparency.

Other existing automation based protocols

The most prominent existing automation protocols are focused on internal protocol automation and not user-faced applications. Typically they require paying execution fees in a specific token and require users to lock up funds similar to the token streaming approach. Furthermore, these typically rely on some off-chain coordination of execution leading to questionable trust assumptions. Thus, these lack the UX and openness for what Socialsub aims to achieve.

Why now?

Socialsub is set to release on Base. The recent EIP-4844 made interacting with L2s significantly cheaper and is now at a point where processing even a <$5 subscription is much cheaper than the fee paying for a traditional web2 payment processor. This means that we can now create subscriptions with all the benefits of being on-chain while still being cheaper than traditional solutions. Additionally, the rise of signature-based subscription models with centralized execution has fragmented the ecosystem and introduced security risks. Socialsub counters this trend by promoting interoperability and decentralization, fostering a unified, trustless standard for on-chain subscriptions.