Architecture

How the Satelink gateway, metering, epoch ledger, and on-chain settlement fit together.

The money path

Every metered request follows one pipeline, end to end:

HTTP request
  → free-tier gate        rate-limits anonymous IPs (500/day); paid keys bypass
  → RPC gateway           routes to healthy upstream providers (circuit breakers)
  → billing               deducts $0.00003/call from the caller's credit balance
  → revenue event         one immutable row per billed call (the canonical record)
  → epoch aggregation     events roll into settlement epochs (~every 10 minutes)
  → settlement batches    per-epoch payable rollups
  → RevenueVault (137)    USDT settlement target on Polygon PoS

Nothing on any dashboard is invented: every displayed number traces back to a row in this pipeline or an on-chain read.

Components

  • RPC Gateway — the public entry point (rpc.satelink.network). Multi-chain JSON-RPC with provider health monitoring, automatic failover, and an edge cache. Live provider status: /rpc/health, /rpc/stats/polygon.
  • Free-tier gate — IP-based metering for anonymous callers backed by Redis counters that reset at UTC midnight. Over-limit traffic receives a self-describing HTTP 402.
  • Credit system — customer balances in USDT. Deposits are permissionless: send USDT to the RevenueVault contract and your account is credited after on-chain confirmation. No custodian sits between your wallet and the vault.
  • Epoch ledger — billed events aggregate into epochs (~10-minute windows). Epochs produce settlement batches with the 50/30/20 revenue split applied.
  • Settlement — batches broadcast to Polygon when funded and enabled. Settlement automation is currently in final verification (dry-run mode); the ledger aggregates continuously either way. See Roadmap.
  • Node network — permissionless operators register via the node portal and serve routed traffic for 50% of revenue. See Node Operators.

On-chain contracts (Polygon PoS, chain 137)

ContractAddress
RevenueVault V20x577D3716d6Ad5b676d230f5409deF9838FABaCEF
USDT (settlement token)0xc2132D05D31c914a87C6611C10748AEb04B58e8F

Both are verifiable on Polygonscan.

Design principles

  1. Truth over polish — a metric that cannot be traced to a real query or an on-chain read does not ship. Empty states are honest.
  2. Permissionless both sides — depositing capacity and serving capacity both work without approval from us.
  3. Machine-first onboarding — the HTTP 402 flow means an autonomous agent can discover pricing, register, and pay without a human in the loop.