Getting paid

When a dataset of yours is licensed, the payout is written into a contract on Stellar and credited to your wallet. Your earnings page shows it as an amount to claim: the price, minus the protocol fee, minus any refund. Today there is no fee and no refund, so for every sale so far that amount has been the full price.

Where the money sits

No Datavar account holds payout money. One used to, and we closed it. Earnings sit in the payout contract, which has one rule for paying out: it pays the wallet that signed the request. Datavar can record whom the money belongs to, but it cannot pay itself, redirect a payout, move funds out, or stop you claiming yours.

The contract also refuses to credit a sale it can't cover. A balance on your earnings page is money already in the contract, so you are not relying on an account we control to pay you later.

Claiming

Press claim and your wallet asks you to sign. The contract pays you and returns a transaction hash, which resolves on a public explorer even if this site is down.

Your wallet's account has to exist on Stellar before it can sign, which granting consent also requires. Testnet accounts open with friendbot in a click.

Why XLM

A Stellar payment costs a fraction of a cent and settles in seconds, so a fifty-cent payout is still worth sending. On most rails the fee would eat it.

What a dataset earns

Rare data earns more than common data. The estimator on the home page quotes the average settled price per category, computed from real sales. A category nobody has bought yet shows a dash instead of a made-up number.

The licence contract

We have written and tested a licence contract, but it is not deployed. Once it is, a buyer's payment will be held for a short period (planned at 7 days, or until the receipt's end date if that is sooner) before your share is credited to the payout contract, and a protocol fee (planned at 10%) will be taken from each sale. If you revoke during that hold, the buyer gets back the share of the price for the unused term. A revocation after the hold refunds nothing.

Buyers are simulated while the demand side is built, and payouts settle in test XLM on Stellar testnet. The contract and the payments are on-chain; the demand behind them is not real yet.