Glossary

Canonical definitions: epoch, settlement batch, RevenueVault, free-tier gate, demand radar.

Canonical terminology, used consistently across the site, docs, consoles, and codebase.

Credit — prepaid USDT balance attached to an API key, deducted $0.00003 per metered call. Credits never expire.

Deposit listener — the service watching Polygon PoS for USDT transfers to the RevenueVault; credits the sending wallet's account after ~25 confirmations.

DePIN — Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network: real hardware, operated permissionlessly, coordinated and paid on-chain.

Distribution pool — the 20% revenue share distributed to top-performing nodes based on uptime and traffic.

Epoch — an aggregation window (~10 minutes) that rolls individual revenue events into a settlement batch, so settlement doesn't pay per-call gas.

Free-tier gate — IP-based metering for anonymous callers: 500 calls/day per IP (and per /24 subnet), reset at UTC midnight, enforced with Redis counters.

HTTP 402 flow — Satelink's machine onboarding: over-limit or unfunded calls receive 402 Payment Required with a self-contained, machine-readable body (registration endpoint, deposit calldata, real minimum, working examples).

Machine customer — a non-human API consumer (agent, bot, service) that onboards and pays autonomously through the 402 flow.

Metered rate — the flat price per billed call: $0.00003 USDT ($30 per million calls).

Node operator — a permissionless participant serving routed RPC traffic for 50% of the revenue it generates.

Revenue event — the immutable per-call billing record; the canonical source for every revenue figure. Test/phantom rows are flagged and excluded.

RevenueVault (V2) — the production vault contract on Polygon PoS (0x577D3716d6Ad5b676d230f5409deF9838FABaCEF) that receives permissionless USDT deposits.

Settlement batch — a payable rollup of one epoch's revenue with the 50/30/20 split applied; broadcast on-chain when settlement is enabled and funded.

Settlement dry-run — the current safety mode: batches aggregate and are fully accounted, but on-chain broadcasting is disabled until the signer is funded, real external revenue crosses the threshold, and a human enables it.

Wallet-bound key — an API key created by signing a message with MetaMask (no gas); deposits from the bound wallet credit the key automatically.