How Earning Works

Rising Tide runs on two kinds of money, each with a clear job. You are given starter funds to make things. You earn Bitcoin when other people value what you made. You never have to buy your way in - you create your way in.

Two currencies, two jobs

Most apps have one balance and one direction: you pay, they take. Rising Tide has two, and they move in opposite directions.

• Starter funds are for creating. They are given to you - an amount when you arrive, topped up as you go. Publishing a page, dropping a bottle, launching an event: each costs a little. They exist so you can act on day one without spending a cent of your own.
• Bitcoin is for collecting. When someone collects a piece you made, you earn real Bitcoin, counted in sats. You spend those same sats to collect other people's work. This is the currency that matters - you earn it, you own it, and it is genuinely yours.

The shorthand: starter funds get you making; sats are what making earns you.

The loop

Everything on the protocol runs on one simple circle. You are handed enough to make something. Someone values it enough to collect it, and that pays you in sats. You spend those sats collecting someone else's work - which pays them. Round it goes.

The last step feeds the first: every time you collect something, you are the person paying a creator in sats. No one is topping the system up from outside. The value moving through it is value people made for each other. We are all in the same pool.

You create your way in

The usual way into anything crypto is to buy your way in - open an exchange account, pass a verification check, move money across a bridge, and only then do anything. Most people give up somewhere in the middle.

Rising Tide removes that wall. You arrive with funds already in hand, so your first act is to make something, not to fund an account. And your first sats do not come from a faucet or a giveaway - they come from someone collecting your work. The protocol itself is the first buyer: it collects an edition of your very first piece and pays you in sats for it, so you are earning from the moment you start. See Your first earnings for exactly how that works.

Where your Bitcoin goes

The sats you earn are your balance - the pool you spend from, however it was filled. As it grows, it stops being pocket change and starts being savings. Because it is real Bitcoin, you can eventually move it off the protocol into a wallet only you control, the same way you would move money from checking into long-term savings. That step is always yours to take, never forced. From earnings to savings walks through it.

In this section

• What things cost, and what you earn - The two currencies, what each is for, and why they are kept separate
• Your first earnings - The loop up close, and how the protocol seeds your first sats
• Funded invites - How a newcomer arrives already set up - funded, in the right apps, ready to act
• From earnings to savings - Your sats are real Bitcoin; how to move them into savings you hold yourself