3.5 Payment channel

A universal public distributed HTLC network (such as the Lightning network) will take at least a year to land, but the low-trust shaft-to-spoke payment channel network is fast, inexpensive, and can be implemented now. Payment channels are very important to RPC for two reasons:

-Implement purchasing behavior in the virtual world

-Encourage content servers and P2P servers to improve service quality

Today, major platforms have mitigated the inherent risk of credit card payments themselves: users trust the platform, and distrust apps can protect their payment details. With a payment channel, users can buy directly from the developer without worrying about identity theft.

Some of RPC infrastructure royalties support micropayments. The cost includes hosting content, providing content, running P2P protocol, etc. The marginal cost of running an app on an RPC is close to its actual cost because it is essentially commoditized. However, to keep future developers without access barriers, RPC will use sales of RPC tokens as a reward for providing these services.