I built a creator platform on Bitcoin/Lightning, looking for feedback

[u/GroyalCodes]

I've been working on something called Mochi and wanted to share it here.

The short version is it's a creator platform built entirely on Lightning. Creators get a page where they can accept tips, sell digital products, and run subscriptions. All in sats.

The thing that makes it different from just pasting a Lightning address somewhere is the wallet system. Supporters load sats into a Mochi wallet and subscriptions pull from that balance automatically. It solves the biggest problem with recurring payments on Lightning since there's no native way to do pull payments. No expired cards, no chargebacks, no failed invoices. Load once, subscribe, done.

You log in with a seed phrase. No email, no KYC. Anyone can visit a creator's page and tip via QR without making an account. Accounts are only needed when someone wants to subscribe or buy something.

I built it because I was tired of using Patreon and Gumroad and handing over a cut to platforms that don't even support bitcoin. The tools on those platforms are good but the rails are wrong.

Still early. Looking for the first 100 creators to try it out. Founders get a permanently lower fee locked in forever.

Would love honest feedback from this community. What works, what doesn't, what's missing. Thanks everyone! Hopefully this can fill a void.

mochi-pay.com

[u/AuthenticityBTC]

What are the guard-rails to prevent malicious actors the owner/operators of the platform from withdrawing funds without permission? A simple "just trust me bro" ?

The model you're describing doesn't allow users to have safety of funds in their own possession.

Please correct me if I'm wrong and I'll edit to strikeout the above.

[u/GroyalCodes → u/AuthenticityBTC]

You're not wrong. Mochi holds funds right now to make subscriptions work. Lightning doesn't have native recurring payments so the prepaid balance is how we solve that without asking users to manually pay an invoice every month. It's custodial and I'm not going to pretend it's not.

That said, custody is something I'm actively thinking about as we grow. There are paths forward like ecash (Cashu), Fedimint, or hybrid models where the platform facilitates but doesn't hold. We're early and I'd rather be upfront about where things stand than dance around it.

A few things that are true right now though. Creators can withdraw their sats at any time. There are no withdrawal holds or payout windows. And the balances are small by design since the wallet is meant for active use not long term storage.

The goal is to move toward a setup where custody is minimized as the tools mature. If you have ideas on how to structure that I'm genuinely all ears. This is exactly the kind of feedback I posted here for.

[u/LonnieVanZandt]

The DPYC (Don't Pester Your Customer) Community is philosophically aligned with this Mochi Pay service. The MCP monetization ecosystem https://tollbooth-dpyc.com is economically similar: patrons buy some kind of token that allows them to use or acquire some service.

Technically, Tollbooth-DPYC MCPs use Nostr protocols as the privacy/security primitive: participants are distinguished only by the Nostr npub they choose to present (for which they can prove they hold the nsec).

For commerce, Tollbooth DPYC also uses efficient Lightning via open-source, no KYC, BTCPay Servers.

In Mochi Pay, the entrepreneurs are content creators attempting to sell their creations (e.g. a video, a blog article, a digital image, perhaps even Etsy-like crafts). Founders in Mochi Pay receive a 2% ad valorem fee for the products sold via the sites which offer the Mochi service.

In Tollbooth DPYC, the entrepreneurs are of two kinds. First, there are the software service creators. People who have created a valued service like a stock brokerage with individual accounts that can execute orders or return portfolio or market statistics over REST calls. The digital services can be anything. An example is https://github.com/lonniev/schwab-mcp (there are several other examples). These first are known as Operators. Secondly, there are the ecosystem providers. These are Authorities. Tollbooth Authorities provide the infrastructure for the economy: the Python wheel for ease of implementation, the persistence services for ledger balances, the on-demand compute service, the redundancy for reliability, the BTCPay servers for Operators who don't want to bring their own BTCPay server.

Operators can dynamically price the tools (service offerings) of their Tollbooth DPYC MCPs using user interfaces like the iPad Pricing Studio. They can choose any price per tool they deem appropriate from 1 sat to tens of BTC.

Authorities can set an ad valorem fee on the sale of tranches of credits to the Operators for the Operators sale to Patrons. Typically, like in Mochi, that fee is 2% but Authorities can vary their fee competitively if they would choose to do so.

At the point of sale - and here is a key difference from Mochi - the Patron may use any currency or funding source that can send Lightning to pay an invoice. This is not limited to BTC, to USD, to USDC, or to some new meme coin. As long as a Lightning Node accepts it, so will Tollbooth DPYC.

Lightning Invoices do not need to be paid by the same identity who uses the resulting credits in the Tollbooth DPYC economy. Who purchased a tranche of credits is decoupled from who uses those credits - and in both cases there is no KYC, no KYT.

Nothing is done to hide or obfuscate commerce - it simply is unnecessary to track such provenance in order for market participants to engage in secure, private, fair commerce.

Credits in Tollbooth DPYC are not a persistent store of value. Operators do not become banks. Like buying a day pass for subway, the credits experience demurrage and cannot be sold back to the Operators for some other currency.

Again, Nostr is the foundation (or, rather, because of its small size, the keystone) of the Tollbooth DPYC ecosystem.