Vocabulary

Every platform invents words. These are ours, and there are not many. If a page uses one you do not recognise, it is defined here.

Money

Starter funds are what you spend to make something. You are given them - a funded invite arrives with an amount already in your wallet, and you do not buy them. Publishing a page, dropping a bottle, launching an event each cost a little. See How Earning Works.

Sats are what you earn when someone collects your work, and what you spend to collect someone else's. A sat is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the way a cent is the smallest unit of a dollar. Unlike starter funds, sats are scarce - they only exist here because somebody valued something enough to collect it.

Your balance is the pool of sats you can spend. It is called a balance rather than earnings because being collected is one way to fill it, not the only one.

Things you make and keep

A piece is anything you publish - a poem, an open letter, a ticketed event, a bracket entry, a message in a bottle. They are all the same underlying thing wearing different clothes.

An edition is one numbered copy of a piece, owned by one person. Edition #1, edition #2, and so on, in the order they were claimed. The number is permanent and so is the record of who holds it.

To collect is to claim an edition of somebody else's piece. It costs sats, and those sats go to the people who made it - immediately, with nothing in between.

To transfer is to hand an edition you own to somebody else. It stays numbered, and the handover joins the public record.

The visual layer

A template is the visual design a piece is published in - the layout, the type, the decoration. Templates are made by artists, and the artist earns a share of every collect of every piece published in theirs. Choosing one is not a licensing negotiation; it is a click.

A sticker is a single illustrated element that layers onto a piece. Same idea as a template, smaller unit, same automatic royalty.

People and access

An invite is how someone joins. It is not just a code - an invite arrives carrying starter funds and access to specific apps, so a newcomer can publish something on their first day rather than shopping for currency first. See Funded invites.

Achievements are the first five things worth making, in the order that makes sense. Each rung is something you publish or collect, each one opens the app the next rung happens in, and the last one hands you an invite to give. See Achievements.

A rung is one step of the climb. You are only ever shown the next one, because a list of five is a menu and one is an instruction.

Your shelf is what you have earned so far, at the top of your hub, with that next rung under it.

A cause is an approved organization a creator can route a share of every collect to. Set once when the piece is created, paid automatically forever after. See Support a Cause.

Where things live

On-chain means written to a public network that nobody owns and nobody can edit after the fact. When these pages say a record is permanent, that is what they mean: not "we promise to keep it", but "there is no mechanism by which it could be removed".

Permanent storage is a decentralized network that keeps a frozen copy of an archived piece readable indefinitely, independent of Rising Tide. Publishing puts the record on-chain; archiving puts the artwork and content into permanent storage. See Permanent Storage.

Your address is the identifier that owns your work and receives your payments. Whether it came from signing in with Google or X or from a wallet you already had, it is yours and it works across every app on the protocol.

---

Building on the protocol? The typed glossary - schema fields, status machines, contract-level identifiers - is on the developer site: Glossary.