How Cliply works
Everything under the hood — the escrow, the payout gates, who can do what, where the trust actually sits, and the token economics that fund it all.
A settlement layer for clips
Cliply is a marketplace where creators buy distribution and clippers get paid for it. A creator posts a brief with a rate per 1,000 views and locks a budget in an on-chain escrow. Clippers cut the source content, post it to TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or X, and submit their links. Approved clips earn the posted rate on verified views, and payouts clear from escrow straight to the clipper's Solana wallet — no invoices, no net-30, no middlemen.
Identity is the wallet itself: signing in is a free message signature, and the wallet that signs is the wallet that gets paid.
Four events, one ledger
Every clip lives through the same trace, the one animated on the landing page: ESCROW_FUNDED — the creator deposits SOL into the campaign's escrow and the brief goes live; CLIP_SUBMITTED — a clipper posts and files the link, which sits pending with no money moving; VIEWS_VERIFIED — the submission is reviewed against the brief and a view count is attached, automatically from the YouTube Data API for YouTube links and at review time for other platforms; and PAYOUT_CLEARED — the escrow signs a transfer and Solana settles it to the clipper's wallet in seconds, with a public transaction signature as the receipt.
One account per campaign, chain as truth
Every campaign gets its own dedicated Solana account, generated fresh at creation. Funding never passes through Cliply: the creator's wallet signs a plain transfer directly into the escrow address, which is displayed on the brief and can be audited by anyone on Solscan before a single clip is cut.
The chain is the source of truth for money. The budget shown on a brief is reconciled from the escrow's live on-chain balance — budget = balance + already settled — so an unfunded campaign honestly displays zero, and topping up is just another transfer. Two safety rails apply to every payout: the escrow is never drained below Solana's rent-exempt minimum, and if it can't cover the full amount owed it pays what it can, records the partial, and leaves the remainder owed for the next top-up.
How a payout is decided
No money moves automatically. Payment is the last of a chain of gates. Submitting a clip creates a pending record — nothing else. A reviewer (the campaign's creator, or a platform admin) then judges the clip against the brief and attaches a view count; YouTube counts can be pulled live from the YouTube Data API, other platforms are entered at review. Approval runs a deterministic formula:
· zero below the campaign's minimum views · clipped to the per-clip cap · never revised below what's already been paid
Even approval moves nothing — it records what's earned. When the reviewer presses Pay, the server computes owed = earned − paid, the escrow signs a transfer for exactly that delta to the clipper's wallet, and only after Solana confirms is the ledger written: the payout row, the clip's paid total, the campaign's spend. Chain first, ledger second — a failed transaction can never fabricate a "paid" record. Because views keep growing, the cycle repeats: refresh or re-approve with a higher count and the next Pay settles just the difference.
Who can do what
Own their campaigns end to end: fund and top up the escrow, pause and resume the brief, review submissions, set view counts, settle payouts — and withdraw the remaining balance back to their own wallet at any time.
Browse live briefs, submit links from the campaign’s platforms, and track views, earnings and on-chain receipts from the dashboard. Payment arrives at the wallet they signed in with.
Platform operators. A Review tab covers every campaign: they can approve or reject clips, verify views, pause campaigns, and settle payouts from any escrow — but deposits and withdrawals stay creator-only, and payouts they trigger can only go to the submitting clipper’s wallet.
Where the trust actually sits
Cliply's escrow is custodial in this release, and the docs would be dishonest not to spell out what that means. What it gives you: funds are segregated per campaign at a public address anyone can audit, budgets are read from the chain rather than claimed, and every settlement leaves a permanent transaction signature. What it does not give you: trustlessness.
Three layers, plainly. First, the admin role has no direct path to escrow money — there is no endpoint that pays an admin, and withdrawals only ever return funds to the campaign's creator. Second, review power is indirect spending power: whoever decides a clip's view count decides what the escrow owes, so admins are bounded by visibility — on-chain receipts, a payout ledger, and creators who can pause or withdraw the moment something looks wrong — rather than by code. Third, the platform operator holds every escrow's key: that is what custodial means, and it is why the roadmap replaces this design with an on-chain escrow program where funds can only move by rule — approved submission, verified views — and no human holds a key that can bypass it.
Verify it yourself
You don't have to take any of the above on faith. The entire site and engine — every page, the escrow logic, the payout math, the permission checks, and the 43-assertion test suite — is public. Start with SECURITY.md for the threat model and a file-by-file audit map of the money paths, and watch the CI run re-prove every invariant on each commit.
Sourcegithub.com/lyftical/cliply10% in — 60% back into the chart
Cliply charges exactly one fee: 10% of each escrow payout, taken at the moment of settlement. Clippers keep 90% of everything they earn. There are no listing fees, no subscriptions, and no cut of creator deposits — an unspent budget withdraws in full.
The second split is the token engine, and it runs three ways. 60% of protocol profits buy $CLIPLY back on the open market — straight back into the chart. 30% funds Cliply-run campaigns on this marketplace — protocol-funded briefs whose escrows pay clippers directly, making the protocol its own biggest creator. The remaining 10% covers operations. Put together, for every 1.000 that settles, 0.100 flows to the protocol: up to 0.060 returns as $CLIPLY buy pressure and 0.030 is recycled into fresh briefs — fee volume literally funds the next round of clipper payouts.
Status: $CLIPLY is pre-listing — until it trades, protocol fees accrue to the treasury and the token page charts SOL, the settlement currency. Fee routing activates with the mainnet release; the current build settles 100% of payouts to clippers.