The write-up
PAY-AS-YOU-LISTEN
A podcast listener pays the podcaster while they listen — through one Cashu Spilman channel instead of a separate invoice every minute.
Today's Value4Value streaming pays per interval, so a 90-minute episode means 90 round trips to a mint. We replaced all of them with a single prepaid channel that the listener re-signs and the server verifies locally, without asking anyone. Whatever the listener does not spend comes back on close.
The amount is chosen by the listener, not the server: the podcaster advertises no price, only a minimum channel size, which is what Value4Value means. We built both sides from source — the Rust channel core with PyO3 bindings for the Python server and WASM for the browser player — because Spilman is a still-open specification with no released package on PyPI, npm or crates.io. All of it was proven end to end against a real mint: real keysets, real signatures, a full open-pay-close cycle.
The same mechanism fits anything billed by usage — streaming video, API calls, metered compute. Sovereigncast and the Nodesignal Cashu Player are both self-hosted: no third party, no listener account, and the mint sees two swaps instead of a hundred.
A podcast listener pays the podcaster while they listen — through one Cashu Spilman channel instead of a separate invoice every minute.
Today's Value4Value streaming pays per interval, so a 90-minute episode means 90 round trips to a mint. We replaced all of them with a single prepaid channel that the listener re-signs and the server verifies locally, without asking anyone. Whatever the listener does not spend comes back on close.
The amount is chosen by the listener, not the server: the podcaster advertises no price, only a minimum channel size, which is what Value4Value means. We built both sides from source — the Rust channel core with PyO3 bindings for the Python server and WASM for the browser player — because Spilman is a still-open specification with no released package on PyPI, npm or crates.io. All of it was proven end to end against a real mint: real keysets, real signatures, a full open-pay-close cycle.
The same mechanism fits anything billed by usage — streaming video, API calls, metered compute. Sovereigncast and the Nodesignal Cashu Player are both self-hosted: no third party, no listener account, and the mint sees two swaps instead of a hundred.