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
mjolnir.tv is the running product. The codebase ships continuously, and the network keeps creators in control of their audience and their revenue.
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.