logicsrc/docs/openswarm/pay2seed.md

pay2seed: The Client Protocol for Paid Seeding

Status: 0.1 draft. Member of the OpenSwarm family. Depends on the core, ipfile, ippay and ipdb. Its server half is paid2seed.

1. Scope

pay2seed is the side that pays. It is spoken over HTTPS by a requester, a person or a program that wants data kept alive on a swarm by machines they do not control, to a hub. It defines:

• Consent. A signed attestation, made when the data is added, that the requester has the right to distribute it and accepts notice. A hub MUST NOT list an offer without one. This is the part BitTorrent never had.
• Offers. A request to store, archive or share a swarm for a period, with a budget escrowed at the hub, a number of seeders wanted, and a proof cadence. Public offers cover vanilla torrents and ipdb feeds; private offers cover ipfile swarms whose ciphertext a seeder holds without ever reading.
• Encryption by default, and access. A private swarm is ipfile ciphertext under a key the requester holds. Who else may decrypt it is a team: members the requester invites, and a keeper that issues grants to them when the requester is offline. This is what a hub charges for. Public is encryption switched off by an explicit act, and is listed and kept like anything else.
• The requester's view of the market, of standing, and of notices.

Everything on the BitTorrent side, how a seeder takes a lease, proves it holds and serves the pieces, and is paid, is paid2seed. The two documents share one hub, one set of record types, and one lifecycle; the split is who speaks which half. A hub implements both. A requester client implements only this one. A seeder client implements only the other.

ipfile.pin (c0mpute §3.1) is this document's offer carried on c0mpute's job auction; paid2seed §8 gives the mapping.

Non-goals

Judging content. A hub sees an attestation, an infohash and, for a private swarm, nothing else. It enforces that the attestation exists, is signed and is honoured on notice; whether it is true is the requester's liability, and §8 is how a false one is undone. Not a DRM. Not a token. Not a replacement for ippay vouchers: a swarm that charges leechers keeps charging them.

2. Terminology

• Requester. The identity that posts an offer and funds it. Usually the publisher of the swarm; for a public torrent it may be anyone who wants it kept alive, subject to §3. A key, not necessarily a person: an autonomous agent is a requester like any other (§5.8).
• Seeder. An identity that holds a lease and serves the swarm (paid2seed).
• Hub. An ippay hub that also implements this document and paid2seed. bittorrented.com is the reference hub.
• Attestation. The consent record (§3). Offer. The request (§4).
• Period. The unit of accrual and proof, proof.everyHours long.
• Visibility. public (a vanilla torrent or an ipdb feed) or private (an ipfile swarm; ciphertext only).

Keys, records, signatures, amounts and times are as in the core.

3. Consent: the attestation

An attestation is the requester saying, under signature, what the data is and why they may distribute it. It is made once per swarm, before the first offer, and every offer for that swarm references it.

3.1 Record

{
  "openswarm": "0.1",
  "type": "pay2seed.attestation",
  "subject": { "infohashV1": "4330ddb304b78b1398a77297f57ea22c1ef3fb56", "infohashV2": null, "file": null },
  "visibility": "public",
  "basis": "own",
  "license": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "description": "Field recordings, Dartmoor, 2026",
  "notice": "https://example.com/.well-known/pay2seed-notice",
  "acceptsTakedown": true,
  "createdAt": "2026-09-05T18:00:00.000Z",
  "sigs": [{ "alg": "ed25519", "key": "ed25519:0d87…", "sig": "…" }]
}

Field	Rule
subject	Exactly one of file (an ipfile file key; visibility MUST be private), infohashV1/infohashV2 (at least one; visibility MUST be public), or channel (an iplive channel key; see pay2stream §3). A feed offer (§4.4) attests the feed key in file.
visibility	public or private. Fixed for the life of the swarm.
basis	Why the requester may distribute this. One of §3.2.
license	REQUIRED when basis is open-license: an SPDX identifier.
description	OPTIONAL, at most 280 characters, shown on public listings.
notice	An HTTPS URL or mailto: at which the requester receives notices (§8). REQUIRED for public.
acceptsTakedown	MUST be true. Present so the acceptance is in the signed bytes.
readme, readmeSha256	REQUIRED. The swarm's README.md and the hash of the copy inside the swarm (§5.6). No README, no listing.

Signer: the requester key. For an ipfile subject the attestation MUST also carry a signature by the file's publisher key, which is how a stranger is prevented from attesting somebody else's private swarm. For a public infohash no such proof of authorship exists; §3.3 stands in for it.

3.2 Basis values

basis	Meaning	Allowed visibility
own	The requester made it or holds the rights outright.	either
licensed	The requester holds a licence that permits redistribution.	either
open-license	Released under the SPDX licence in license.	either
public-domain	No rights subsist, or they were waived.	either
personal	The requester's own data, kept for themselves: backup, archive, sync.	private only

A hub MUST reject an attestation whose basis and visibility disagree with this table, and any with an unlisted basis. Hubs MAY refuse to list particular bases; the hub record says which (§6.1).

3.3 Public infohashes and the claim window

Anyone can attest a public infohash, so the attestation is a claim. A hub lists a public offer only after a claim window (claimHours in the hub record, default 24) during which the infohash and the attestation are visible at GET /offers/<id> and on the pay2seed.offer.listed event, and a notice voids it. An offer for a swarm that already has an honoured attestation from a different key is refused unless the new basis is open-license or public-domain, the two that do not depend on who is asking.

A requester's standing (paid2seed §6.3) records every attestation of theirs that was voided. A hub SHOULD refuse new public attestations from a key whose voided count exceeds its accepted count, and MUST refuse them from a key with three or more voided in the last year.

4. Offers

An offer is money on the table for a swarm to be kept for a period. It is bought from the hub as an ippay pass is, so the budget is settled before anyone starts seeding.

4.1 Record

{
  "openswarm": "0.1",
  "type": "pay2seed.offer",
  "hub": "ed25519:c9f1…",
  "requester": "ed25519:0d87…",
  "attestation": "sha256:8e1c…",
  "subject": { "infohashV1": "4330ddb304b78b1398a77297f57ea22c1ef3fb56", "infohashV2": null, "file": null, "feed": null },
  "visibility": "public",
  "sizeBytes": 7462331904,
  "days": 30,
  "seeders": { "min": 3, "max": 10 },
  "priceUsdPerGibMonth": "0.150000",
  "budgetUsd": "12.000000",
  "proof": { "everyHours": 6, "verifiers": ["hub"] },
  "pass": null,
  "trackers": ["udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce", "wss://tracker.openwebtorrent.com"],
  "startsAt": "2026-09-05T18:00:00.000Z",
  "expiresAt": "2026-10-05T18:00:00.000Z",
  "payment": { "network": "eip155:8453", "nonce": "0x2f0a…" },
  "createdAt": "2026-09-05T18:00:00.000Z",
  "sigs": [{ "alg": "ed25519", "key": "ed25519:c9f1…", "sig": "…" }]
}

Field	Rule
hub	The hub that sold it and holds the budget. Signer.
requester	Who paid, bound at purchase as ippay §3.3 binds a payer.
attestation	Record id of an attestation whose subject and visibility match.
subject	As the attestation, plus OPTIONAL feed: an ipdb feed key (§4.4).
sizeBytes	Ciphertext or payload size. For a feed, the size at posting.
days	Period the swarm is to be held from startsAt.
seeders.min	Leases before the offer is active; max caps them.
priceUsdPerGibMonth	What one seeder earns for the whole swarm for 30 days, pro rata.
budgetUsd	Escrowed. At least max * priceUsdPerGibMonth * sizeBytes/2^30 * days/30, rounded up.
proof.everyHours	Period length, 1 to 168.
proof.verifiers	hub, requester, or c0mpute.
pass	For a private swarm whose pricing.perGib is non-zero: an ippay.pass scoped to the file so a seeder can fetch as a paying peer.
trackers	Announce URLs the seeder MUST add. At least one wss:// when browser peers should find it.
startsAt, expiresAt	expiresAt is startsAt + days. Leases never outlive it.
payment.nonce	The settlement that funded budgetUsd.

4.2 Purchase

POST /offers with an unsigned draft (every field but hub, payment, sigs, createdAt) and no X-PAYMENT header answers 402 with an x402 offer for budgetUsd plus the hub's fee (paid2seed §5.3), exactly as ippay §3.2 answers a pass purchase, with the same X-OpenSwarm-Payer binding. Repeating with a valid proof answers 201 with the signed offer. A hub MUST verify the referenced attestation before quoting, and MUST refuse a private offer whose sizeBytes disagrees with the manifest.

An offer is pending until seeders.min leases exist, active from then until expiresAt, then settled. It is voided by a notice (§7) or by the requester (DELETE /offers/<id>, signed), and the unearned budget is refunded to the requester's payout address less what leases have accrued.

4.3 Public swarms

A public offer is a vanilla torrent. Nothing in the wire changes; the only new thing on the network is another well behaved seeder that stays. A podcast archive, a dataset, a software release, an out-of-print recording with a clean basis: kept alive by strangers who are paid for it.

4.4 Public feeds

An offer whose subject.feed is set covers an ipdb feed: every segment swarm the feed publishes, present and future, and the duty to keep the feed's head reachable. What a leased seeder must do about it is paid2seed §7. sizeBytes is the feed's size at posting; each new segment joins the accrual base at the period it is proven, and the hub MUST NOT hand out leases whose projected accrual exceeds budgetUsd. The requester tops up with a further offer for the same feed.

4.5 Private swarms

A private offer is an ipfile swarm. The seeder holds ciphertext and, without a grant, cannot read a byte of it. personal is the basis for a backup nobody else is ever meant to read; its pricing SHOULD be zero and its manifest SHOULD not be catalogued. Where the manifest has keys.public set the data is readable by anyone with the manifest and the offer is still private in this document's sense: the attestation says the requester may store it.

5. Encryption by default, and who may decrypt

5.1 The default

A client adding data through pay2seed encrypts it. The default swarm is an ipfile swarm: AES-256-CTR over pieces under a content key the requester's publisher key derives and holds (ipfile §4). Nothing about the data, not its name, not its size to the byte, not a single block, is readable by a seeder, a tracker, the DHT, or the hub. visibility is private.

The client encrypts. The hub never does, never holds a content key it was not delegated as keeper, and never sees plaintext; what it manages is access to keys, not the bytes.

Encryption is a choice the requester makes off, not on. A requester who wants the world to have the data sets visibility to public: the swarm is a vanilla torrent and there is no content key. A public swarm is not a fallback and not a second class: it is attested, listed, kept by paid seeders and rendered on the hub exactly as a private one is. The only difference is that anyone who finds it, on the hub or on the DHT, can read it. A client MUST make the default private, MUST make turning it off an explicit act, and MUST say plainly what off means: anyone.

5.2 Access is the product

What a private swarm needs, and what BitTorrent never had, is a way for the requester to say who else may decrypt it, and for that to keep working when the requester's laptop is closed. That is a team: a named set of member keys held at the hub, with a policy over which of the requester's swarms each member may receive a grant for. The hub, or a keeper it delegates to (ipfile §3.2 delegate, c0mpute's keeper role), issues the grant when a member asks. The requester never has to be online for a colleague to open a file, and never has to hand anyone the content key itself.

Seeding is priced at the cost of disk. Teams are where a hub earns: seats, groups, an organisation with many groups, audit, and the guarantee that a grant is there at three in the morning.

5.3 Records

{
  "openswarm": "0.1",
  "type": "pay2seed.team",
  "hub": "ed25519:c9f1…",
  "owner": "ed25519:0d87…",
  "name": "field-recordings",
  "members": [
    { "key": "ed25519:a1b2…", "box": "x25519:4c40…", "role": "admin", "since": "2026-09-06T10:00:00.000Z" },
    { "key": "ed25519:c3d4…", "box": "x25519:9e11…", "role": "member", "since": "2026-09-06T10:05:00.000Z" }
  ],
  "scope": { "files": ["*"], "publishers": ["ed25519:0d87…"] },
  "keeper": "ed25519:c9f1…",
  "createdAt": "2026-09-06T10:00:00.000Z",
  "sigs": [{ "alg": "ed25519", "key": "ed25519:0d87…", "sig": "…" }]
}

Field	Rule
owner	The requester key. Signer. Only the owner and admin members may change the record; every change is a new signed record and the hub keeps the history.
members[].key, box	The member's signing key and the X25519 box key a grant is sealed to (core §4.4).
members[].role	admin (may invite and remove), member (may receive grants), readonly (may receive grants for files the team marks so).
scope	As a pass's scope (ippay §3.1): which file keys or publisher keys members may be granted. ["*"] files under the owner's publisher key is the common case.
keeper	Who issues grants: the hub's key, or a keeper the owner has delegated to. The owner's publisher key remains able to grant directly.

An invitation is pay2seed.invite: { "team", "to": <email, phone, ipname or key>, "role", "expiresAt" }, signed by an admin. It travels out of band (the hub emails or messages it) and is redeemed with a key: the invitee's client mints one if they have none, and the hub adds the member. An invite to a key that already exists is added at once. An invitation MUST expire, 7 days by default.

A grant to a member is an ipfile.grant (ipfile §3.2) with delegate: true and pass: null, sealed to the member's box, issued by the keeper. It is what an ippay pass buys for a stranger, handed instead to a member because the team says so.

5.4 Removal and rotation

Removing a member ends future grants at once. It does not, and cannot, unread what they have already read; a grant they hold for a file still decrypts that file's current key epoch. A team with rotateOnRemove: true (the default) has the hub trigger ip file reencrypt on the files in scope (ipfile §11, a new content key and a new swarm), so the next version is closed to them. A client MUST show this distinction to the owner rather than imply removal is retroactive.

5.5 What the hub charges

A hub prices teams as it likes and says so in its record:

"teams": { "freeMembers": 3, "seatUsdPerMonth": "2.000000", "orgUsdPerMonth": "50.000000", "keeperBps": 500 }

freeMembers seats per owner cost nothing, so a person sharing with their family or a three-person shop never pays for access. Above that a seat is billed monthly, an organisation (many teams, one bill, shared admins) at a flat rate, and keeperBps is the hub's share when it acts as keeper for a paid file (ipfile §7). All of it is settled through the same pay plugins the rest of the family uses, CoinPay and x402 over the owner's ippay payee, never a card form of the hub's own.

Both sides earn. A seeder rents out disk through paid2seed. A requester sells access: to strangers through ippay passes at the swarm's keyUsd and perGib, to colleagues through a team. A hub takes its hubBps on payments that cross it, 1 percent at the reference hub (ippay §5.1), plus its seat fees on teams, and nothing at all on the seeder's floor. Public swarms are not charged for; they carry an ad instead (§5.7).

5.6 The README

Every swarm on the market MUST contain a README.md at its root. No exceptions: an attestation without one is refused, and a hub that lists a swarm without one is not conformant. The README is the swarm's face: what this is, who made it, what a buyer or a member gets, how to use it.

The attestation carries it, so the hub can show it without a key:

Field	Rule
readme	The README's Markdown, UTF-8, at most 64 KiB. Signed with the rest of the attestation.
readmeSha256	SHA-256 of the exact bytes of README.md inside the swarm. For a private swarm, of the plaintext; a member with a grant MAY verify it.

The hub renders readme as HTML on the swarm's page: CommonMark with GFM tables and fenced code, sanitised, no raw HTML, no scripts, images only from the swarm itself or over HTTPS. A relative link resolves to a file in the swarm and is gated the same way the file is: a public swarm's link downloads, a private swarm's link asks for a pass or a grant. That page, on bittorrented.com, is the listing; the DHT crawl's bare infohashes never had one, and this is what a consented swarm looks like beside them.

5.7 Public swarms pay for themselves

Public distribution is free to the requester and free to the fetcher, and it is not charity. A public swarm has a page on the hub, built from the README (§5.6), and that page carries an advertisement. The hub earns from the page; the swarm's bytes are never metered, never gated and never counted.

This is the trade, stated so nobody has to guess at it:

	Public	Private
Bytes	free, over the ordinary wire and the DHT	ipfile ciphertext, perGib and keyUsd as the manifest says
Who may read it	anyone	pass holders and team members
What the hub earns	the ad on the swarm's page	its percentage of each payment, plus seats (§5.5)
What the requester pays	nothing, unless they buy an offer to keep it alive	nothing, unless they buy an offer or seats

A requester who wants no advertisement on their page pays for a seat (§5.5); a hub MUST make that switch available rather than making the ad the price of being listed at all. An ad never appears inside a swarm, is never injected into a file, and never rides the wire: it is on the hub's page about the swarm and nowhere else. ipdb entries and the market API carry no advertising, so a client that reads the catalogue directly sees none of it.

5.8 An agent may be a requester

Nothing in this family assumes a person. A requester is a key, and an autonomous agent holds keys as readily as anyone: it can attest what it made, publish a swarm, price access to it, sell tickets to a live channel, take payment through its own ippay payee, and spend what it earns buying offers so its own work stays online. The same is true on the other side: an agent with disk can hold leases and be paid for them (paid2seed §7).

Two rules, and they are the same rules a person gets:

• The attestation is the agent's own claim, signed by the agent's key, and its standing (§3.3) is the agent's. An agent that attests what it had no right to distribute loses standing exactly as a person does, and a hub applies §3.3's refusals without asking which kind of requester it is looking at.
• Consent does not become weaker because a machine gave it. An agent publishing work made from somebody else's material has the same bases available and no others; own means the agent or its operator holds the rights, and there is no basis meaning "a model produced this, so nobody owns it".

A hub MAY require an agent's attestations to name a responsible operator key alongside the agent's own, and the reference hub does for public swarms: an agent can sell freely, and somebody remains reachable when a notice arrives.

5.9 API

Method and path	Auth	Purpose
POST /teams	owner signed	Create or replace a team record.
GET /teams/<id>	member signed	The record, its history, the files in scope.
POST /teams/<id>/invites	admin signed	Issue an invitation; the hub delivers it.
POST /invites/<id>/accept	invitee signed	Redeem with a key; returns the updated team.
DELETE /teams/<id>/members/<key>	admin signed	Remove; triggers rotation when the team says so.
GET /teams/<id>/grant?file=	member signed	A sealed grant for a file in scope, from the keeper. 403 outside scope or after removal.
GET /teams/<id>/audit?since	admin signed	Who was granted what, when.

6. The requester's hub

6.1 Hub record

An ippay.hub record that offers this family adds:

"pay2seed": {
  "base": "https://bittorrented.com/api/openswarm/pay2seed",
  "bases": ["own", "licensed", "open-license", "public-domain", "personal"],
  "claimHours": 24,
  "minStanding": 0,
  "verifiers": ["hub", "c0mpute"],
  "maxDays": 365
}

bases is what this hub will list. minStanding is the floor a seeder needs to take a lease (paid2seed). A hub MAY run a market for private backups only, or for open data only, by narrowing bases.

6.2 API, requester side

All bodies JSON, records verified on receipt, paths relative to base. The seeder side of the same API is paid2seed §6.1.

Method and path	Auth	Purpose
POST /attestations	signed record	Register. 201 with its id; 409 if one is honoured for the subject by another key (§3.3).
GET /attestations/<id>	none	The record and `{ "status": "claimed
POST /offers	x402 + X-OpenSwarm-Payer	Buy an offer (§4.2).
GET /offers?visibility&basis&minPrice&maxSize&feed&status	none	The market, newest first, paged. What a seeder client reads; what a requester watches.
GET /offers/<id>	none	The offer, its status, leases held, slots free, periods proven per lease.
DELETE /offers/<id>	requester signed	Void and refund the unearned budget.
GET /requesters/<key>	none	{ "standing", "attestations", "voided", "offers" }.
POST /notices	signed	A notice against an attestation (§7).
POST /webhooks	signed	Register a CloudEvents endpoint for a requester key.

7. Requester client behaviour

A requester client (the ip seed commands in cli.md, a web app such as bittorrented.com's upload form) does the following:

1. Holds a requester key, stored as an OpenCreds key item, registered as an ippay payee so refunds have somewhere to go.
2. Makes the attestation before anything else, and MUST NOT let a user post an offer without choosing a basis and, for public, a notice endpoint. The basis list is a choice, never a default. 2b. Encrypts by default (§5.1). Turning encryption off is an explicit act with its consequence stated. Shares a private swarm by inviting members to a team (§5.3), never by handing out a content key.
3. Buys offers only against attestations the key actually signed.
4. Includes a pass in a private offer when the manifest charges per GiB.
5. Watches GET /offers/<id> or the events for active, lapsed leases and settled, and shows the user seeders held out of wanted, periods proven, and spend against the budget.
6. Receives notices at the endpoint it named, and shows them.

8. Notices and takedown

Anyone may POST /notices against an attestation:

{
  "openswarm": "0.1",
  "type": "pay2seed.notice",
  "attestation": "sha256:8e1c…",
  "kind": "rights|illegal|personal-data|other",
  "claimant": { "name": "…", "contact": "mailto:…" },
  "statement": "…",
  "createdAt": "2026-09-06T09:00:00.000Z",
  "sigs": [{ "alg": "ed25519", "key": "ed25519:77aa…", "sig": "…" }]
}

On a notice the hub MUST forward it to the requester's notice endpoint and MUST, within claimHours, either void the attestation or record that it was reviewed and stands. Voiding an attestation voids every offer that references it: leases end (paid2seed §3.2), the requester is refunded the unearned budget less accrued earnings, and their voided count rises. A hub that voids on every notice without review is conformant; a hub that never voids is not.

For a private swarm the hub cannot inspect the content and does not pretend to. What it has is the requester's identity, attestation and standing, which is what accountability looks like for ciphertext.

9. Security notes

• Attestation is a claim. §3.3's window, standing and notices are the defence. A hub that lists a public offer the moment it is paid is not conformant.
• Hub as escrow. The budget sits with the hub for days, as a pass buyer's capUsd does for 30. The hub's signed receipts and refunds are its auditable trail.
• Private means ciphertext, not secret existence. An offer reveals to its seeders the file key, the size and the requester's key. personal swarms SHOULD use a fresh unrelated file pair (core §4.2) so backups are not linkable to a publisher's catalogue.

10. Implementations

Piece	Where	Status
Reference hub, requester side: attestations, offers, market, notices	profullstack/media-streamer (bittorrented.com)	planned; the seedbox rental rail is the pay-per-pass half today
Requester client and shared records	@profullstack/pay2seed	planned
Requester CLI	ip seed … (cli.md)	proposed

11. Conformance

A hub is conformant on this side when it refuses offers without an honoured attestation (§3), enforces the basis table and claim window (§3.2, §3.3), escrows the budget before listing (§4.2), publishes the market and requester standing (§5.2), and forwards and resolves notices within claimHours (§7). It MUST also be conformant to paid2seed.

A requester client is conformant when it does all of §6.

12. Version history

• 0.1 (2026-09-06): split out of the first pay2seed draft (2026-09-05) as the client half; attestation, offers, requester API, notices. Same day: encryption by default, teams, invitations, member grants, rotation on removal, and the hub's pricing for access. Then: the 1 percent reference fee, the advertisement that pays for public swarms, and agents as requesters.