peertube-plugin-tollgate

Let your creators get paid when their videos are downloaded — automatically, per download, with a public receipt.

PeerTube instance admins have asked for a way to pay creators for years, and there is still no in-tree feature (issue #1586 ran 7 years). Existing options either take a large cut on small amounts or route money off-platform with no proof it reached the creator.

This plugin closes that gap. When a viewer downloads a video, the plugin routes a small payment straight to that video's creator and writes a tamper-evident receipt you can hand to the creator or show publicly. No per-download platform fee, no custody in the middle, and the receipt is verifiable by anyone.

What it does

• Gates video downloads behind a small payment (configurable price, off by default until you set a creator wallet).
• Routes the payment to the creator and records a hash-chained receipt (each receipt links to the previous one, so the ledger can't be silently edited).
• Adds a small "Support the creator" panel on the watch page.
• Exposes a /proof endpoint that lists every receipt and confirms the chain is intact.

Payments settle in USDC on Arc, so the minimum viable payment is a fraction of a cent instead of the ~$2 floor card rails impose — which is what makes per-download payments possible at all. Viewers and creators never need to think about any of that; they see a price and a receipt.

Install (self-hosted PeerTube)

The plugin follows PeerTube's peertube-plugin- package convention and has been validated from a local path in a Docker-backed PeerTube instance. It has not been published to npm from this repo.

For local install against your own instance:

peertube-cli auth add -u 'https://your.peertube' -U 'root' --password '...'
peertube-cli plugins install --path /absolute/path/to/peertube-plugin-tollgate

Configure (admin settings)

• Default creator wallet / Creator wallet mapping — where payments go. Mapping is one videoUuid=0xWallet per line; the default is used when a video has no explicit entry.
• Price per unlock — atomic USDC (6 decimals). 2500 = 0.0025 USDC.
• Gate downloads — whether downloads are blocked until paid.
• Operator private key — the wallet that funds payouts. Leave empty to run without on-chain payouts (nothing settles).
• Arc RPC / chain id / FeeRouter / USDC / explorer — default to Arc testnet; override to point at another deployment.

Verify a payment

Open /plugins/tollgate/router/proof on your instance for the receipt list and chain status, then follow any transaction to the block explorer.

Honest notes

• Settlement is per-download (and per-view is recorded for analytics). PeerTube exposes a counted-view hook, not per-second watch-time, so this plugin does not meter watch-time.
• The MVP payout is operator-funded: your operator wallet routes the payment to the creator. A viewer-signed flow is a planned enhancement.
• This plugin uses PeerTube's plugin router with req.rawBody (added by PeerTube PR #6300, which exposes the raw request body for signature verification — it is a primitive, not a built-in payments feature).
• Real-world reach depends on admins choosing to install it; the demo runs against a self-hosted instance.

License

AGPL-3.0.