Your first earnings
The create-to-earn loop up close - and how the protocol becomes the first buyer of your first piece, so you earn sats from the very start.
There is a catch hiding in any earn-to-spend system, and it bites the very first person hardest. Rising Tide solves it by having the protocol buy your first piece itself.
The cold-start problem
To collect someone's work, you spend sats. To earn sats, someone has to collect your work. Read those two sentences together and you have a closed circle: on your first day, nobody has collected anything from you yet, so where does your first sat come from?
Handing out free sats would answer it, but it would also make sats feel free - and the whole point is that they are earned. So the protocol does something different.
The protocol buys first
When you publish your first piece, the protocol collects an edition of it. Not a giveaway, not a faucet - a real collect, at a real price, paid to you in sats. The protocol is simply your first customer. Your first sats arrive the same way every sat after them will: as income from someone valuing your work.
What you actually earn
Whenever an edition is collected, the payment splits the way you set your piece up. The artist behind your visual template earns their royalty automatically; you keep the rest. So your first earning is your share of that first collect.
It is a small amount - a few dollars at most - but it is enough to turn around and collect a handful of other people's pieces yourself. That is the point: the loop closes on your very first turn, so you are never stuck holding a balance of zero.
After the first one
Once you are in, the protocol steps back. Real people collect your work and pay you; you collect theirs and pay them. Your first earning was a seed to get the circle turning - everything after it is the community collecting from the community.
The rules that keep it honest
- It seeds your first piece only. One edition, once. It is a starting push, not a running subsidy.
- It is for invited newcomers. The seed follows a funded invite, which ties it to a real person who was vouched for and keeps it from being farmed.
- It is all real value. What you earn is sats you own, not points on a scoreboard.
Developers and operators can read the mechanics - the payable create fee, the seeding service, and the switches that turn it on - in The create-to-earn economy.
What things cost, and what you earn
The two currencies on Rising Tide - what you spend to make something, and the real Bitcoin you earn when someone collects it. Why they are deliberately kept apart.
Achievements
The first five things worth doing, in the order that makes sense - each one opens the next app, and the last one hands you an invite to give away.