Channel types

Five access models, chosen at creation and never changed afterwards.

	Open	Protected	Closed	Gated	Paid
Who reads	Everyone	Password holders	Allowlisted addresses	Token or NFT holders	Active subscribers
Who writes	Everyone	Password holders	The same	The same	The same
Enforced by	Open by design	Client-side encryption	Gate contract	Gate contract	Gate contract
Content on the wire	Signed plaintext	AES-256-GCM ciphertext	AES-256-GCM under a channel key	Same	Same
Cost to join	Free	Free	Free, the owner pays gas to add you	Holding the asset	The subscription price
Moderators	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Listed in Explore	Optional	Optional	Never	Optional	Optional

Closed, gated and paid are the contract-backed family: one gate contract per channel decides membership, and content is encrypted under a channel key only members obtain. They differ only in the rule the contract enforces. Which layer enforces reading, writing and history, and what happens when someone loses access, is in How access works.

Two flags fixed at creation

Identity on the wire, contract-backed channels only:

	Sealed (default)	Visible
Publisher on the wire	The channel's shared publish key	The gate contract
Who can attribute a message	Members	Anyone, without a key
What an ex-member can still publish	Bytes that spend the channel's retention, until the owner resets the publish key. Clients drop them on arrival	Nothing, once the gate cache expires

Read-only: only the owner posts, plus the moderators in a contract-backed channel. Members read, react and show as online in every type.

Other axes

• Listed or Unlisted decides whether the channel appears in Explore. Unlisted is the default and publishes no name or description on-chain.
• A channel can also be write-only, straight from the stream permissions: you publish, you do not read.