Technical Deep Dive: Architecture Choices for Subscriptions on the Blockchain (ERC948)
Architecture choices for ERC948 — Subscriptions on Ethereum
Subscriptions are one of the healthiest monetization methods on the legacy web. At Gitcoin, we believe this will prove to be so on Web 3.0, as well.
Unlike surveillance capital based models, subscriptions still fit within the Web 3 ethos, which prioritizes the following ideals.
- Data to users: Information is owned by the users, and provided to corporations, businesses, or services who hope to benefit the user
- Censorship resistance: No government, company, or institution should control your access to information (1, 2, 3)
- Transparent, open networks: “First, the contract between cryptonetworks and their participants is enforced in open source code. Second, they are kept in check through mechanisms for ‘voice’ and ‘exit.’” — Chris Dixon, (4)
- Push, not pull: ‘Push’ your information to trusted sources, instead of ‘pulling’ from other sources who ultimately own the data (5)
To this point, token based models have been the focus in Web 3 (for good reason). However, subscriptions are preferable to token based systems for both users and founders in some cases.
- Users don’t have to read a complex whitepapers to assess dApp token utility / token vesting schedules
- Users can cancel anytime, without having to own any tokens
- Founders can get a consistent, ongoing stream of cash flow while assessing the health of their business (subscribers, churn, growth)
- Founders can focus on making customers happy, as opposed to splitting time between speculators and users
For these reasons, we think it’s worth creating a standard way to do subscriptions on Ethereum.
Our progress thus far
The remainder of this article is meant to be a pros and cons exercise for the different architectures of subscription transactions proposed in the ERC948 working group. We examine the execution of subscription transactions and will allow the 948 spec to follow the chosen execution architecture. All of these thoughts are in progress. Nothing is final. We probably make drastic generalizations, silly assumptions, and bias possibilities toward the projects we are building. We welcome comments and feedback.
You can check out the original subscriptions proposal by Kevin Owocki, see what the ERC948 working group is up at the Ethereum Open Subscriptions repo or join the conversation on the Gitcoin Slack.
To read the full story visit: https://gitcoin.co/blog/technical-deep-dive-architecture-choices-for-subscriptions-on-the-blockchain-erc948/
