Hive Engine SMT (Comments) Contract Launch

Hi all,

Wanted to give an update about the SMT (comments) contract here. We've just launched the contract on Hive Engine, which means that a token owner can set up their own Hive-like reward pool without depending on a centralized distribution bot (Scotbot), and where all components are open-source.

Documentation for the contract can be found here.

Not all of the functionality built into Scotbot is in the comments contract. The most prominent are the following:

• No claims. The rewards pay out directly to the users.
• No overall token beneficiary. When rewards are paid out, there is no option to automatically redirect to the token owner. But this is effectively equivalent to automatically issuing to a designated account on a schedule.
• No mute functionality. This means that besides the downvote mechanism, there is no way to prevent rewards from going out to muted users. This can be added without too much trouble, but will only add it if requested.

We also already have the first comments-contract-powered frontend at https://dunksocial.io set up by Hive account@dunksocial.

Comments Contract Indexer

We do not keep all state on the hive engine nodes, only the information needed to compute rewards. This means an indexing solution is needed to tail hive engine blocks. I have repurposed a portion of the existing scotbot for this purpose and have released its source with instructions on how to run it here. It's a bit rough, but wanted to release a usable version quickly for others to be able to use it / build upon it. This is similar to the HiveMind indexer that builds views to power various frontends. It tails both the hive nodes and the hive engine sidechain nodes, the hive nodes for post data, and hive engine nodes for payout and vote data.

As with Scotbot, this indexer implements the methods documented here. One notable difference is that since this indexer has hive post data, it can implement a get_thread endpoint that can fetch all posts and replies up to a certain depth for a given author and permlink.

Comments Contract Nitrous Frontend

Since the comments contract indexer shares a lot in common with the Scotbot API, the Nitrous frontend did not take too long to adapt to work with the comments contract. The main part is fetching voting power data from hive engine API, and comment reward pool information. You can see the code in this branch.