Pillar 05
Finance
Transparent cost accounting, collective treasury management, and cooperative attestation badges. No tiers, no subscriptions, no profit extraction — just the actual cost of running your infrastructure, made legible.
Design philosophy
Most platforms monetize through subscriptions, advertising, or data sales. irl.coop does none of these. Instead, it operates on a transparent cost model: every member sees exactly what their participation costs the cooperative to provide, and contributions are made voluntarily at or above that calculated cost.
Cost calculation
Each member's usage generates a calculated cost comprising four components:
Setup cost
A one-time cost amortized over a membership period covering the computational resources consumed to provision the member's identity, storage allocation, and initial data sync. This is typically very low — a few cents to a few dollars depending on the shard configuration.
Recurring: power and data storage
An ongoing cost reflecting the electricity consumed by the member's data storage and the physical storage space it occupies. Calculated monthly based on actual storage usage measured in gigabytes and the shard's known energy cost per unit.
Platform maintenance
A proportional share of the collective cost of maintaining the software stack: security updates, infrastructure monitoring, DNS, SSL certificates, and the time of members who perform this maintenance work.
Sponsored transaction fees
When the cooperative sponsors on-chain actions on behalf of a member (governance votes, treasury transactions, credential issuance), the gas fees are tracked and included in the member's cost calculation.
Payment and attestation
When a member contributes at least their calculated cost to the cooperative treasury, they receive a cooperative attestation badge — a verifiable credential issued by the cooperative and stored in the member's wallet. The badge is on-chain and portable; it can be presented to other cooperatives in the federation as proof of good standing.
Members who contribute more than their calculated cost are helping to cover the costs of members who cannot afford to. This cross-subsidy is the cooperative model in practice.
Collective support
Any member (or anyone, including non-members) can pay the calculated cost for any other member. This enables:
- Working groups to sponsor their coordinators' infrastructure costs
- External supporters to contribute to specific members' participation
- Solidarity payments — paying for members in economic difficulty
- Bulk payments for newly onboarded cohorts
Treasury management
All contributions flow into the cooperative treasury, a multi-sig wallet controlled by the governing council. Treasury spending requires multi-signature approval and is logged on-chain. The treasury dashboard shows:
- Current balance by asset (fiat, ETH, ATOM, etc.)
- Incoming contributions by member and period
- Outgoing payments by category (power, hosting, maintenance, etc.)
- Per-member cost breakdown
- Projected runway based on current contribution rate
Multi-chain support
Contributions can be made in:
- Fiat via cooperative bank account or payment rails
- EVM tokens (ETH, USDC, stablecoins) via the member's EVM wallet
- Cosmos tokens (ATOM, OSMO) via the member's Cosmos wallet
- Bitcoin via Lightning Network
All on-chain contributions are automatically reconciled against the member's calculated cost and update the attestation badge status accordingly.