ECHO kicks off in this spring. The initial idea is to build a more reliable comment widget with Arweave, which helps us to keep our social engagement data reliable, decentralized, persistent and censorship-resistant.

And because of this innovative and affordable data permanent storage framework, ECHO is able to fight to preserve every single person’s opinion on anything in the world.

To all content creators, DeFi traders, NFT collectors, DAO builders, and many many other substantial components in Web3 - our opinion is our spiritual asset, and we deserve to have a better tool to speak up, with the true right of the freedom of speech.

In this article we will introduce our observation of current issues with Web3 social engagement and how ECHO strives to tackle them down.

We Need Better Tooling

The following comment widgets have been existed for a good amount of time.

• https://disqus.com

• https://giscus.app/ (Github discussion)

• twikoo.js (Self hosted)

• https://utteranc.es/ (GitHub issue)

• https://github.com/gitalk/gitalk (GitHub issue)

However there are some obvious problems with these tools:

• The data does not belong to the person who made the comment or obtained it.

• Accounts in centralized services, like GitHub, may be banned due to geopolitics.

• Self-hosting on a server has substantial cost and technology barriers.

Therefore ECHO is designed to solve these issues with principles as follow:

• Each comment will be uploaded with signature of user.

• Wallet and data can’t be deleted or modified.

• It is an out-of-the-box solution.

Key Features

Decentralization

Decentralization consists of three aspects: decentralized authorization, decentralized data and decentralized front-ends.

Users sign into ECHO with a decentralized wallet. It means you can sign and upload data to Arweave with and without using a front-end page. The related SDK will be released as open source later.

Arweave is a decentralized solution for archiving data. We will provide multiple official gateways and open source our codebase. We also encourage the community to set up their own gateways. Any gateway will synchronize valid data uploaded by other gateways.

Our front-end code has been deployed to ipfs. People can use any ipns gateway to visit our widget.

Besides web3 products, we also encourage non-web3 or non-dweb products to use our widget.

Opinion Aggregation

ECHO uses target_uri to identify the comment target. We have designed a set of url schema to identify different objects. Users may comment on the same object, such as a NFT, on different websites and apps, but as long as the target_uri is the same, the corresponding comments will all be displayed.

The followings are some examples of schema:

dweb/ipfs/{cid} // ipfs page
dweb/ipns/{path} // ipns page
database/imdb/{imdb} //  movie
database/isbn/{isbn} // book
https://{path} // http url

Multi-chain Login and Tip

ECHO supports MetaMask (EVM chains) and Phantom (Solana). If user log in with MetaMask, we will retrieve and display reverse record and avatar of their ens or .bit.

The comment target of the following widget is https://0xecho.com.

Fee

The price to store data on Arweave is less than $2.5/1G at this point (2022-09-01), which is cheaper compared to annual fee of Amazon S3 in the long run. The data in ECHO is lightweight text-based. We use Arseeding to upload data to Arweave regularly.

Each user will get the first 200 uploads/day for free. These free uploads are able to cover most people’s daily use. You will feel at ease just like using Web2 apps, when you make comments or thumb-ups via ECHO.

Also, to avoid abuse, a wallet with non-zero balance is required.

Out-of-the-box Solution

The iframe embed widget is easy and hassle-free to get in our website.

• Modules are configurable.

• Theme color is configurable.

• DID to receive donations is configurable. (.bit and ens are supported)

“Tip” module only demo:

“Like” module only demo:

Why “ECHO”

When we comment on a thing, we call it an echo; when someone makes a response to the comment, maybe a thumb-up, it is also an echo.

In Shell and PHP, echo is also used as a command to output the strings that are passed to it as arguments.

The word “echo” presents voice, and also response. We want ECHO to record them all.

Our Slogan

Individual’s views are ignored in recorded history. However, History should not be just about the thing but also the thought. Our opinion is a part of things. Saving our views, emotions, likes and dislikes permanently equals capturing the moment forever.

With internet and blockchain, it is possible for experience and thoughts of our current era to reach far into future. That is, time fades, but views live on.

That’s why our slogan is Long live our opinion.

Feedback

ECHO is in beta, and will be continuously optimized and promoted. Please feel free to contact us and share with us your views and suggestions.

Website: https://0xecho.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/0x_ECHO

Credits

• .bit Web3 identities for you and your community

• Planet Content publishing app based on IPFS

• Arseeding Lightweight Arweave data seed node