View and track transactions and royalty payments

August 16th, 2022

SHARE is a protocol built on blockchain that enables creators to choose the price per stream of their audio or video content, distribute the content directly to consumers, make it accessible on any web application, and receive payments instantly when their content is streamed. SHARE has a wide variety of applications including music, video, and podcasts.

Introduction

The SHARE Protocol (SHARE) is for artists who create premium music experiences. You, the creator, can distribute your music directly to consumers (peer-to-peer) under terms and at a price you choose, and receive payments instantly when the music is streamed. When you specify your access terms to the music, SHARE creates a smart contract and generates a link to the location of the music. Anyone with the link can share it. Each time another user pays for access to the music, you and other owners of the music receive a royalty payment to your wallets.

This article overviews the process to view and track transactions and royalty payments by accessing the blockchain explorer, Polygonscan.

Prerequisites

Locate your Contract

Once you’ve deployed your smart contract content and consumers pay for access to your content, you and any other contributors to your content will start receiving royalty payments to your wallets. You may be interested in viewing the details of these transactions and where royalty payments are going.

Here’s an example.

Navigate to this song, Almost Weekend - Turn You On.
Select “Contract Details” to expand section and view the details of the contract.
Select the link (represented by the hexadecimal address) under “Contract Owner”. This link will take you to Polygonscan.

Polygonscan is a block explorer that lets you view public data on transactions, smart contracts, addresses, and more on the Polygon blockchain. All interactions on Polygon are public, and Polygonscan allows you to look through them like a search engine.

Understanding a Single Transaction on Polygonscan

On Polygonscan you’ll notice that the “Contract” address in the upper left of the screen is the same as the address that appeared on the previous SHARE link.

Select the “Internal Txns” tab to view all the transactions that take place on your content’s smart contract. In this case, we're looking at the royalty split contract that is associated with your content.
- An internal transaction is an action that is occurring within, or between, one or multiple smart contracts. In other words, it is initiated inside the code itself, rather than externally, from a wallet address controlled by a human.
For each transaction there are two entries:
- Entry 1: A payment from the consumer to the contract.
  - This is the payment the consumer makes to access your content.
  - The payment goes from the consumer’s wallet or Google Pay/Apple Pay to the ‘Protocol Contract’, and then from the ‘Protocol Contract’ to the ‘Content Contract’.
- Entry 2: A payment from the contract to the wallets of the contributors on your contract.
  - This is the royalty payment.
  - In cases where there is only a single contributor, payment is sent from the ‘Content Contract’ to the contributor’s wallet address.
  - In cases where there are multiple contributors, payments are sent to a ‘Split Contract’, and then from the ‘Split Contract’ to the contributors’ wallet addresses.

In the example:

Entry 1 (highlighted in pink): A payment of 0.27027 MATIC was paid from the consumers wallet address (0x1fea916b08907f6151c8aec164913322b4f9852e) to the contract address (0x59c2f46b4d49e5f43f53ef77e780607cfed92722).
Entry 2 (highlighted in blue): A royalty payment of 0.27027 MATIC was paid from the contract address (0x59c2f46b4d49e5f43f53ef77e780607cfed92722) to the wallet address of the contributor (0x9d8A1725F6CeC1Bd58785Fd1e73F99AEd27adb3b).

SHARE uses a unique royalty payment method that randomly cycles through wallet addresses as transactions occur, and automatically distributes royalties proportionally to contributors. Learn more about this method here. Notice these transactions take place instantly! You can see they transacted on the same block (Block: 3751301).

The Internal Transactions (Txns) List

In the ‘Internal Txns’ tab you can view all the transaction records for the plays of your content.

Using the song example from before, here’s a view where transactions are sent to a ‘Split Contract’ and then royalty payments are made to multiple contributors.

The green rectangle highlights the wallet address of the contributor that received the royalty payment from the transaction.
The orange oval highlights the amount of MATIC that is received by the contributor from the transaction.

Customizing Transaction Information

When you create content on SHARE, and then want a way to easily track how each piece of content is performing, you can add name tags to the wallet addresses. These tags will then appear on the transaction record instead of the hexadecimal wallet addresses. This is particularly useful for quick identification of content and contributors if you have multiple pieces of content that are generating transactions. This information will only be visible to you.

To do this:

Create an account with Polygonscan.
- Select “Sign In” in the upper-right navigation menu.
- Select “Click to sign up” that appears after the information form.
- Input your preferred credentials and confirm your account via email.
Login to Polyscan with your credentials.
Select “Address Private Notes” from the left-hand navigation menu.
- Input the ‘Address’ and the ‘Name Tag’ for each contract address and contributor wallet address that you want to track.
- As an example, use the content title as the name of the contract address and names of the contributors for each of their associated wallet addresses.

Using the information from the prior section, the following ‘Name Tags’ are used to exemplify tags for each address. In this case, there are five contributors to the content, so each contributor address has their own tag.