Why æternity
Superhero is an on-chain social network: posts, comments, tips, token trades and votes are all transactions. That only works if the chain underneath keeps writing affordable, keeps identity native to the protocol, and lets contracts verify user signatures. æternity provides all three.
Affordable on-chain writes
æternity keeps each write light enough that every post, comment, tip, trade and vote can be its own transaction. A post or a comment pays gas only, with no posting fee, and gas price follows network demand. See AE & Gas for how a fee is computed.
Protocol-level names
.chain names are part of the protocol, not an application-level registry contract. A name
resolves the same way for every wallet and explorer on the network, so a Superhero display name
is portable rather than Superhero-specific. See AENS and
Chain names.
Native signature verification in contracts
Sophia exposes Crypto.verify_sig, and æternity defines a signed-message prefix
("aeternity Signed Message:\n", with a fixed 28-byte header) that a contract can reconstruct.
Superhero's Tipping and AddressLink contracts hash a message with Blake2b, prepend the prefix
to produce a 60-byte payload, and verify it with Crypto.verify_sig. That is what makes
delegated posting possible: a user signs off chain, a relayer pays
the gas, and the contract still attributes authorship to the signer.
Sophia's safety properties
Sophia is strongly and statically typed with no mutable global state, which reduces the surface for reentrancy and state-corruption bugs. See Sophia & FATE and Contract security.
AEX-9 as the token standard
Every community token and the ProtocolDAO token is an AEX-9 fungible token, so third-party wallets and explorers read Superhero balances without integrating with Superhero. See AEX Standards.
What Superhero does not use
| æternity feature | Used by Superhero? |
|---|---|
| State channels | No. See State Channels. |
| Oracles | No. Superhero accepts and links ok_ addresses but registers and queries no oracle. |
| Generalised accounts | No. |
Video calls at /meet/:room run on Jitsi, and chat runs on Nostr relays. Neither is an
æternity layer-2 mechanism.
Related
- Sophia & FATE: the language and VM.
- AE & Gas: what the cost figures above are made of.
- State Channels: the headline feature Superhero does not use.
- Architecture Overview: where the chain sits relative to the app and the backend.
- What is æternity? (opens in a new tab): the chain's own overview.