Sovereign payments, minimally extractive

Blockchain powered

Built on the newest payment technology

Smart contract enabled blockchains are the only payment technology that can provide the guarantees we're aiming for.

Low cost

the fee

Legacy payment services are another form of middle man that diminishes the ultimate income for artists.

Card processor 2.9% + 30¢ vs Station <$0.01

Programmable

the rules

Artist accounts carry special guarantees that can't get changed later. Smart contract accounts make the mission of minimally extractive a reality.

Sovereign

the control

Smart contracts are not owned or managed by Station, they belong to the artists and live on a distributed system not owned by Station.

The mechanism

Station's solution for fairness

Every artist contract has a payment splitter built into it.

All funds flow through smart contracts, the payments land in artist-owned contracts and are divided instantaneously — the artist's share, and Station's share, according to the split written into that specific contract. Artist funds sit in this account until they withdraw them.

There's no invoice, no billing cycle, and no moment where Station holds the artists' funds. The division happens at payment time. The splitter itself is OpenZeppelin's PaymentSplitter — audited, secure, and an industry standard.

Solid lines carry money. Dashed lines carry information. The hairline boxes mark what belongs to whom.

Station owns this

Factory

Theoretical rate — 5% | 95%

station | artist — the rate

Inherited at creation - immutable, unchangeable

The artist owns this

A fan pays

Artist's contract

Releases, merch, fan club

5% | 95%

Artist's server listens for transactions

Artist's server

Catalog and access

Artist can only withdrawal

95%

Station can only withdrawal

5%

Every sale settles against the rev share rate the contract was deployed with.

Money can move wallet to wallet without smart contracts, but aren't able to distinguish what product a payment was for. Funds are available and split instantly.

The factory's rate may rise for contracts deployed later. It cannot alter the terms of contracts that are already deployed.

rev share inheritance — testnet, paseo asset hub

The guarantee

Your rate is locked when you deploy

Station can change the rate it offers new contracts. It cannot reach into a contract you've already deployed and take a larger share.

In contrast, a streaming platform sets its terms in an agreement, and reserves the right to change that agreement. The rate an artist starts at is a rate the platform can revisit whenever its business needs it to. There's no recourse, because the terms live on the platform's side of the relationship, and so does the ability to rewrite them.

Station isn't a platform in that sense. Our agreement is a deployed artifact — a number sitting in a contract you control. Our future intentions, funding pressures and changes of heart are all irrelevant to it.

Launching at 0

0% to Station. 100% to you.

0% 100% station | you

This isn't a promotional rate or a free trial that converts later. There's no introductory period and no expiry date. A contract deployed at 0% | 100% stays at 0% | 100% for as long as it exists. If you deploy in this round and Station's split is 5% | 95% in three years, yours is still 0% | 100%.

There's no schedule for rate changes and we're not going to pretend we have one. What we can tell you is the shape of it: the first increase will be 1% | 99%, and increases after that will follow the same pattern — small, incremental, and applied only to contracts deployed after the change.

Early adopters

You take the risk, you keep the better rate

Using Station today means betting on a new unproven model.

That's a real risk, and it isn't one later artists will take. Over time, Station will have more features and become more competitive as a solution for musicians.

The logic is similar to FanSociety, early adopters should be rewarded.

station's cut over time — steps are illustrative

Sovereignty

A robust hybrid system

Station was built so that artists don't need to depend on Station being a successful business in order to keep running their own business. Station enables artists to 'DIY together' and compete against large centralized platforms.

Self-hosted infrastructure: You choose what server provider you want to use and what location. You can even run on your own server if you have the bandwidth and know-how. No applications, registrations, etc.
Peer-to-peer network: Every Station instance is a participant in the network, so artists stay discoverable through each other instead of through a company running a directory.
Public payments: Payments settle on a decentralized network secured by the value held on it, not by any one company. Choose between native crypto currency and stablecoins, or both.

For the curious

A note on upgradeability

If "beacon proxy" means nothing to you, skip this — nothing in it affects your split.

Your contracts are deployed as beacon proxies: your proxy holds your state, and its logic comes from an implementation contract named by a beacon. During launch Station owns that beacon, so implementation bugs found early can be patched for contracts that are already deployed, rather than leaving artists stranded on broken code. It's a transitional window, not a permanent feature of the protocol.

Once the contracts have proven themselves, beacon ownership will be transferred to the zero address. At that point nobody owns it and nobody can upgrade any of these contracts again — not Station, and not whoever might come after Station.

Renouncing the beacon is a public transaction, so you don't have to take our word for when it lands. You can check the beacon's owner yourself on Blockscout.

Plenty of this is unsettled. Join the Telegram and argue with the economics — the people building Station are in there.