Overview

Make something. Every sale pays everyone who made it.

Rising Tide is infrastructure for people who make things. Numbered editions that someone owns, revenue splits that pay every contributor when an edition is collected, and a public record of who made what - so an app can focus on the experience instead of the plumbing.

This page says what is true on the testnet today, and says so separately when a line describes what the design is built to do.

Why this exists

Every creative platform of the last two decades has been built the same way: a company hosts your work on their servers, runs the payment rails, owns the relationship with your audience, and decides what stays up. When the company changes its mind, raises rates, gets acquired, or shuts down, you lose. Your work, your earnings, and your audience belong to the platform - never to you.

Rising Tide is built the other way around.

• The record is on a public network nobody owns. When you publish, the work's words, who made it, who owns each numbered edition and how every sale splits are written to that network.
• The artwork is saved with us until its owner saves a permanent copy. Every rendered edition is held in our storage first. Saving a copy under your own key is a step the owner takes, and it is what makes the copy independent of us. See Permanent Storage.
• A sale pays everyone in the split. When a reader collects an edition, the contract pays each person in the split in the same transaction.
• Your audience is not locked inside one app. The Profile Hub shows who has collected your work, across every app on the protocol.

If we disappeared tomorrow, the on-chain record would remain. The apps that show it, and the artwork we host until an owner saves a copy, would need someone to keep them running.

What that gets you

This is not a Web3 product. The technology is invisible. The aim is that the work, the audience, and the earnings belong to the creator, not the platform, and the way to get there is to make the platform optional.

Start here

Whatever brought you, one of these is the next page.

One primitive, many products

Everything here is the same primitive - a smart product: something ownable, numbered, and permanent, with its revenue split encoded once and paid out on every collect. Writing, open letters, events, predictions, a message in a bottle - these are not separate systems. They are one primitive, shaped for a purpose, and the same shape is open for domains nobody has built yet.

What exists today

The shapes people have made so far.

Pages - numbered editions

Writers, poets, and illustrators publish work as numbered editions - provably theirs, recorded on a public network, and owned by whoever collected them. Readers collect them and can pass them on. Revenue splits are encoded at creation: the writer, the illustrator whose template gives the page its look, any collaborators, and any causes the creator designates all get paid automatically on every collect.

Page types: haiku, tanka, sonnet, open-format writing, and open letters. See For Writers.

Open letters are public statements anyone can co-sign, recorded on the public network. Each co-signer gets a numbered edition and provides a 1-10 agreement rating plus an optional personal note. Organizers see a live sentiment distribution - not just who signed, but how strongly they feel and what they said. That picture of your audience belongs to you, not to a platform.

Templates and stickers - the visual layer

Illustrators and designers publish visual templates that creators apply to pages and tickets. The designer earns a royalty on every collect - no licensing negotiation, no per-deal contracts. Sticker artists publish individual elements that layer on top of any page or ticket. Passive revenue that grows with every creator who builds on your work. See For Artists.

Events - new, and untested

Events are the newest shape. Reservations, tickets and attendee tracking are built into the event itself, tickets are recorded on a public network, and they carry the same visual template system as pages. The calendar is open to browse on testnet. It is untested: no event has been run on it yet, and creating one needs access the Rising Tide team grants for now. If you run workshops or meetups and want to be among the first, ask. See Events Calendar.

Predictions and tournaments - by request

Bracket-style tournaments are built on the protocol but not open for anyone to start yet, and none is open at the moment. Participants submit picks, results are recorded on-chain, and prize distribution is encoded at creation. See Bracket Blitz, and reach out if you want to host the next tournament.

Games - two players, one pot

Two players buy in, play one match, and the winner takes the pot. The winner also keeps the match itself - a trophy, drawn with the final board - and the artist who drew it is paid on every seat. Two games so far, Tic-Tac-Boom and Drop Four; each opens to you on the achievement ladder. See Games.

Causes get paid the same way everyone else does

A creator can route a share of every collect to a cause, set once at creation and paid by the contract on every edition after that. No pledge drive, no reconciliation, no one to forward it. See Support a Cause.

Know your audience

Because everything runs through the same protocol, earnings from every app roll up into a single view - no reconciling data across separate platforms. The Profile Hub lists the people who have collected your work, how many editions each holds and when they last collected, across every app on the protocol. The aim is that your audience relationship belongs to you, not to whichever app introduced you.

Earning is built in

You are given the funds to create, and you earn sats when people collect your work - no card, no exchange, no buying your way in. On the testnet, the funds and the sats are test funds, not real Bitcoin. New creators arrive on a funded invite and start earning from their very first piece.

What you do next is not a guessing game either. Your achievements are seven things worth doing, in order: most open the next app, two of them are a match played and a match won, and the last one hands you an invite of your own to give away. See How Earning Works.

Apps on the protocol today

Everything below runs on the open testnet. It is working software on a test network: the balances and sats in it are test funds, and nothing here is on a live money network yet.

Each app handles its own surface. Identity, ownership, payment, and provenance are shared across all of them through the protocol.

Building on it?

The technical documentation - the SDK, the API, the data model, the contracts - is a separate site: Rising Tide Developers. Start there if you want to build an app on the protocol rather than publish through one.