Interoperability dreams come true with Hypersub

If you're only vaguely familiar with Hypersub, you probably know it as "onchain Patreon" — which is true, but drastically undersells the system created by the Fabric team.

The best software products abstract the nitty-gritty technical details to present a seamless, easily intelligible user experience. There's an infamous Hacker News comment reacting to the launch of Dropbox that begins "I have a few qualms with this app," then continues:

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Of course, by the word "Linux" you've already lost the majority of normal people. Precisely the point of Dropbox is that regular-shmegular users don't need to know what a version-control system is. The operations that Dropbox "quite trivially" performs on the backend become totally unnecessary information, and that's good. Drag and drop the files to the right folder to upload them, easy-peasy ✨

Historically the crypto world has not, uh, excelled at delivering this kind of soothing simplicity. But we're getting there. And Fabric's success at user-friendly abstraction is where the "onchain Patreon" reputation originated. When you subscribe to someone's Hypersub for the first time, it's a natural first impression. You need to know how to use an Ethereum wallet, but not much else. Trust me — I don't know much else, and Hypersub was a breeze to navigate.

What you see is what you get#

A basic overview of Hypersub, from the end-user / customer perspective:

• Subscribe for a specific amount of time, paying up front with ETH or an ERC-20 token, to gain the benefits promised by the creator — weekly airdropped NFTs, a subscriber-only groupchat, premium software, whatever it may be. Hypersub will email a reminder when your subscription is close to expiring.
• The creator publishes Drops, which can be anything, often but not exclusively airdropped to subscribers' wallets. Hypersub doesn't host Drops directly, rather encouraging creators to use whatever web3 platform best suits any given work (e.g. Paragraph for writing).
  • Creators aggregate links to their various creations via Drops, and Hypersub will email alerts to subscribers.
  • For example, musician Gabriel shared a sample pack with subscribers by airdropping an NFT that grants access to a token-gated download link.

The Drops feature is designed to reflect Fabric's philosophy on platform silos and the limiting expectations built into them. "This idea that you have 'creators' and they're these two-dimensional entities that only ever pump out one kind of thing, I don't think that," Fabric cofounder Jonny Mack said on Into the Bytecode. "That does not now and has never mapped to the reality of being a creative person."

Instead, Jonny proposes, "let creative people be all things, let them be what they really wanna be and use different platforms for what [each platform is] good at. Let the audience be transient, let it go with them. And put the ownership of that audience, specifically the economic relationship that the creative person has with that audience, in the hands of the creator. They should own that."

More on audience ownership momentarily. First, the last puzzle piece of most Hypersub subscriptions:

• Creators can allocate a percentage of subscription fees to a Rewards pool; subscribers earn a prorated share based on how long they've subscribed. Creators (or anyone else) can also deposit tokens to the Rewards pool at any time. As long as you stay subscribed, you remain eligible to claim your portion of Rewards.

So that's "onchain Patreon," and it's excellent. But once you dig a little deeper, the true magic is revealed.

Time tokens#

Hypersub is the accessible consumer edifice built around a payment-capable CRM, fully onchain and powered by NFTs, thus interoperable with any system that supports token-gating.

Or, as Jonny likes to put it, "Hypersub is a payment rail that LARPs as a creator platform." Really it's a portal, not a platform. Because Hypersub is a client for the Subscription Token Protocol, invented by Fabric. Hypersub is not, in theory or actuality, the only such client, though it's by far the most popular.

In short, STP adds a time dimension to NFTs. Possessing an NFT with a positive balance of time = valid subscription credential. When your subscription expires, you get to keep the NFT, but the contract updates the metadata to nullify your special access.

"It's a bit like a gift card with $0 on it," Jonny explained. "Technically, you still own the NFT, but because it doesn't have a positive balance of time you won't receive whatever perks and benefits are being offered by the creator."

Creators who use Hypersub directly own their STP contracts, which do not rely on the continued existence of Hypersub or Fabric to keep working. Hypersub facilitates but does not intermediate the relationship between creator and audience, which is so unusual in this age of platforms that it doesn't fit our standard mental models.

The setup is somewhat analogous to owning your own email list — but you don't rely on a third-party platform to store and manage that email list for you. The list is onchain, operated by the contract that you control. Censorship resistance and creator sovereignty are underrated aspects of STP.

Network effects on tap#

It gets cooler. Because everything is onchain, and token-gating is a widely supported mechanism across web3, you can orchestrate exclusive access to venues across the ecosystem. A few common options:

• Subscribers-only groupchat on Warpcast (the Farcaster client)
• Subscribers-only Farcaster channel via Automod (which uses Hypersub as its SaaS engine, naturally!)
• Subscribers-only newsletter via Paragraph
• Discount for subscribers of another Hypersub, or the holders of any particular NFT collection
  • For example, members of the Success community get a 50% discount on Intelligent (Farcaster analytics tool)

Interestingly, Alice doesn't need Bob's permission to give a discount to his subscribers, or put them on an allowlist — because, again, the information is all onchain. Coordination costs are lower, and Bob actually benefits too: the value of his offering increases whenever a third party chooses to reward Bob's subscribers.

Creators have only just started leveraging Hypersub's native interoperability, and it will be exciting to see what else they devise in the near future.

Dynamic and multidimensional#

Let's give the last word to Ted, who uses Hypersub for Club Ted:

hypersub is the economic infrastructure for future communities, the financial rail that empowers creators to build their communities through media and channels that best align with any evolving brand. [...]

this emerging generation of creators are dynamic and multidimensional. they build community through a combination [of] short-form and long-form content, text- and image-based content, and static and dynamic experiences.

As we like to say at Splits, the internet of value. Or, as Jonny put it on Into the Bytecode: "Pooled capital to achieve shared goals and shared upside." That's what this whole Ethereum / web3 world is for, and — say it with me — we're still so early.

Thanks for reading! Now switch to the tab you opened to browse Hypersub.