Boost creators with Bits

Boosting moves to Bits

Boosting now runs on Bits. Bits are the in-app points and currency that the rest of the platform already tracks, so moving boosts onto Bits collapses the boost economy and the points economy into one unit instead of two parallel balances. A player spends Bits on a game, the creator keeps the majority of every boost, and the whole thing settles against the same balance a player earns and holds elsewhere in the app.

The inventory ledger

The substantive change is how balances are stored. Bits balances are tracked in an inventory ledger rather than as a cached number on the user row. user_inventory holds the current balance for an item, and every change writes a matching user_inventory_event describing what moved and why. The inventory is the source of truth: there are no per-user balance columns on users that have to be kept in sync, because the balance is exactly what the ledger says it is.

Reads treat a missing inventory row as zero, so a player who has never touched an item is just an absent row, not a special case. The first write creates the row and records the matching event in the same transaction, which means the balance and the event that explains it always come into existence together. Balances are only ever mutated through one update path, and that path writes the balance row and its event atomically inside the caller's transaction. There is no code path that bumps a balance without leaving the event that accounts for it.

Why a ledger, not a counter

A bare counter on the user row tells you the current number and nothing else. The moment two boosts race, or a refund has to be reasoned about, or a balance looks wrong, a counter gives you no way to reconstruct how it got there. An append-only event log paired with a derived balance does: every boost, every earn, every spend is a row you can audit, and the balance is recoverable from history.

This matters because boosts are how a player who loved a round pays the builder who shipped it directly, with no ad network and no publisher in the middle. Money flowing to creators is exactly the place you want a ledger you can trust rather than a number you hope is right. More ways to earn build on this same foundation.