The problem
Independent creators and streamers were stuck inside platforms that took a cut of every transaction, surfaced their work to algorithms they couldn’t see, and treated the audience as the platform’s, not the creator’s.
We wanted to ship a system where the creator owned the relationship with the audience, where monetization happened directly between them, with the network as plumbing rather than a tollbooth.
What we built
A creator-first platform with three load-bearing pieces:
- A decentralized delivery layer that streams content close to the audience without going through a centralized rights broker.
- A direct-payment rail that lets supporters pay creators without an intermediary skimming the transaction.
- A first-class creator dashboard that surfaces the audience as named relationships, not opaque metrics.
The engineering shape
Edge-delivered, real-time, payment-grade. The architecture privileges low p95 latency over throughput because real-time content has a short half-life and the audience notices a slow stream long before they notice a fast one.
We picked our battles: own the protocol-level pieces that the platform stands on, lean on existing infrastructure for the parts that don’t differentiate us. Cloudflare for edge, Postgres for state, our own real-time pipeline for the parts where Cloudflare alone wouldn’t cut it.
What it looks like in production
Visit mjolnir.tv for the running product. The codebase ships continuously; this is a live engagement, not a finished case study.
What we learned
The most interesting decisions were the boring ones. How aggressively to cache. When to fail-open versus fail-closed. How long a payment confirmation takes to be visibly correct on the creator dashboard. Most of the engineering work was in those edges.