Tracking Super Token Balances

Super Token balances can change every second! How do we approach tracking them?

Compatibility

As Super Tokens are ERC20, they are, generally speaking, backward compatible with the Ethereum infrastructure and ecosystem. You can see your balance in Metamask, transfer funds using Gnosis Safe / swap Super Tokens on Uniswap. Forward compatibility is a bit trickier. Gnosis Safe and Metamask are able to display your balance correctly when you are receiving streams, but that doesn't mean you can "stream-swap" on Uniswap! (at least not yet anyways 😉).

Balance Tracking Considerations

Some applications (notably Etherscan) rely on transfer __ events to first start tracking a user's balance. For scalability reasons however, agreements can't emit transfer events every time a user's balance changes. This leads to certain apps not showing all of a SuperToken's holders, and on occasion showing incorrect balances.

In order to work around this, applications looking to support Super Tokens should look not only to transfer events, but also to Superfluid's AgreementStateUpdated event. This is triggered every time an account's state changes, which is likely to indicate a future change in their balance.

Once you know you need to track an account, the best way to get an up to date balance is by calling the balanceOf function. As you know by now, Superfluid enables a number of new ways to move funds. Only tracking transfers won't cut it!

An excellent open source tool for checking user balances in real time is the Superfluid Console. We suggest leveraging it for your own usage in the protocol:

Superfluid Console