Company · the economic layer

A way to pay that doesn't say who paid.

A private messenger has to be paid for somehow. Advertising and data-mining are off the table — that is the entire point. This page describes how we intend to solve that, and it is a design rather than a product.

Nothing on this page is live

There is nothing to buy, no wallet, no token, and no billing in Avano today. Some cryptographic primitives for this exist in the codebase and no application code calls any of them. One dependency an earlier version of this plan relied on is no longer maintained upstream. This is a direction, and it is filed as one.

The idea

The settlement layer, kept off the message path.

AERE is intended to be Avano's economic layer, and its job is narrow: settle payments — to independent operators who run relays, and for any optional paid features — using blind tokens, so a valid payment can be verified without anyone being able to link it back to the person who made it.

The design principle is a hard wall. Messaging never depends on it. The two systems stay separated on purpose, so the thing that carries your words and the thing that moves money can never be joined into one record of who you are. Avano works if AERE is down, absent, or hostile — and that is a property we would defend rather than a caveat.

The rules it is built around

Three, and the first is not negotiable.

01

Free stays free, and cover traffic with it

The messenger is free, needs no wallet and no coin, and delivery is never gated on a payment. Cover traffic — the feature that hides how much you send — is free and on by default for everybody, permanently, because a privacy lane only some people have marks the people who have it.

02

Pay without being named

The mechanism is a blind signature: the network can confirm a token is valid and unspent without learning which purchase it came from. Paying for privacy should not cost you your privacy, and a payment identity we hold is a payment identity we could be compelled to reveal.

03

No fundraising token

This is plumbing, not an investment product. Billing is designed to ride existing rails and stable settlement rather than a new coin to speculate on. You will never be prompted to buy something to send a message.

Honest status

What exists, and what does not.

Blind-token primitives in the codebaseWritten, no callerThe cryptography that would let a payment be verified without being linked exists and is tested. Nothing in the application calls it. On our own terms that makes it a design, not a capability.
Anything to buyNothingThere is no paid tier, no price, and no purchase flow anywhere in Avano.
A wallet, a coin, or a required tokenNone, and none plannedYou will not be onboarded into a wallet to send a message. For anyone who does not pay, none of this exists at all.
A chosen payment railUndecidedThe primitive an earlier plan depended on is no longer maintained upstream, so the mechanism is genuinely open. There is a simpler shipping precedent worth copying first — selling directly, taking cash or a cryptocurrency, so that whoever handles the payment knows the buyer and we do not.
Consumer rights on a purchaseUnansweredWhat withdrawal, refund and cancellation rights attach when we deliberately do not know who the customer is, is one of the open questions for counsel. It has to be answered before anything is sold, not after.
The unresolved part, stated rather than skipped

Constant-rate cover traffic costs money per user per day.

Here is a real tension in our own plan, and we would rather write it down than let it be discovered.

Cover traffic consumes bandwidth per user per unit of time, not per message. That means a free user's cost is a floor that never falls, however little they use the product. Every sustainable free tier in this market is either close to zero marginal cost or explicitly boxed in — and the closest analogue to a constant-bandwidth-per-user business charges a flat monthly fee and has no free tier at all.

We have committed to cover traffic being free for everyone because the alternative marks the people who paid, and we think that argument is right. What we have not yet done is price it. That number is computable and it should exist before the commitment is repeated at scale. Saying so here is cheaper than discovering it later.

How the company is funded today → · Where this sits on the roadmap →