Peer-to-peer · on-chain · artist-first

The listeners are the network.

Bopwire is a peer-to-peer music network where the people listening also deliver the audio, content is recognized by how it sounds, and every genuine play pays the artist, the seeder, and the relay — settled on a purpose-built blockchain.

▶ Open the web player Read the white paper → View on GitHub
The core idea

Three mechanisms, one loop

Streaming is three businesses stacked together — a catalogue, a delivery network, and a payment rail. Bopwire re-arranges that stack so the audience supplies the pipe and the ledger settles the pay.

Listeners are the CDN

When you hold a song, your device seeds it to others — BitTorrent-style multi-source transfer. Bandwidth scales with the audience instead of a server bill, and every 256 KB piece is checksum-verified on arrival.

Paid per play, on-chain

A genuine play mints to everyone who made it happen — artist, full node, listener, the seeder that served the bytes, and the relay that carried them. Five lanes, one token each, recorded on a public ledger.

Identified by sound

An acoustic fingerprint collapses every upload of the same recording into one canonical entry — so the swarm pools all copies and the royalty always lands on one artist, regardless of who uploaded which file.

How a play propagates

From “tap play” to “everyone paid”

The audio path and the accounting path run in parallel and meet only at the end, when the session reports who served the bytes.

① DISCOVER

Who has it?

The node returns online seeders plus the piece manifest.

② FETCH

Swarm pull

Pieces stream from multiple seeders via a relay, ≤4 Mbit/s each.

③ VERIFY

Per-piece hash

Each piece is SHA-256-checked; a bad one is refetched elsewhere.

④ ACCOUNT

Session

Heartbeats prove ≥50% was genuinely heard, not looped.

⑤ SETTLE

5-lane mint

The node signs a proof and mints to all five participants.

At a glance

Built, not theoretical

5
reward lanes per play
256 KB
verified pieces, multi-source
Private
network-tagged DHT — no public BitTorrent
Non-custodial
escrow held by the chain, not an operator
Documentation

The technical white paper

Network topology, the end-to-end data-propagation flow, the transfer layer, the chain & play lifecycle, tokenomics, the security model, and the real bandwidth/scaling math — written for non-developers without dumbing it down for engineers.

Get it

Run the player

Cross-platform client (Windows desktop + Android). Builds and the white paper PDF are published on the GitHub releases page.