wtf is streamgate?

StreamGate is a hackathon project that lets viewers pay for a live video stream by the second, instead of buying a monthly subscription or the platform taking a cut. Payments are made in USDC, a dollar pegged cryptocurrency, and settled automatically on a blockchain called Arc, without a person approving each transaction. Here is how a viewer's session works. They open the demo website, type in a crypto wallet address, and pick a price per second, for example a tenth of a cent. When they click watch, the video loads directly and a small background service on the streamer's server starts a timer for that viewer. When the viewer leaves, the service multiplies how long they watched by the rate, and sends that exact amount of USDC to the streamer's wallet. A receipt with a link to the blockchain transaction is then shown to the viewer. The project's background service also makes a few automatic decisions on its own, which the author calls its agentic layer. If a viewer's browser crashes or their connection drops without a proper goodbye signal, the service waits 30 seconds of silence and then closes and settles that session anyway. If many viewers are watching at once, past a set threshold, the price per second automatically goes up by one and a half times. Sessions shorter than five seconds are not billed at all, to avoid charging for accidental page loads. The backend is written in Python with FastAPI, uses the web3.py library to send USDC transfers, and stores a log of sessions in SQLite. The live video itself is served by an open source tool called Owncast, which notifies the backend through webhooks when a viewer joins or leaves. The frontend is a simple HTML and JavaScript page hosted on Vercel. The README documents nine specific bugs the author hit while building this, including library version conflicts and a note that direct USDC transfers, rather than a newer payment protocol, turned out to be the reliable way to settle payments on this testnet. This was built for a hackathon focused on streaming and continuous payments, and the code runs against a test network rather than real money.