Requirements

Functional requirements

• Wallet-based authentication through nonce signing.
• Separate reader and author workspaces.
• Author onboarding with profile metadata and slug.
• Post publishing with draft, published and archived states.
• Project publishing with a file/folder tree.
• Reusable access policies for posts and projects.
• Access rules based on public content, subscriptions, token balance and NFT ownership.
• Reader subscriptions paid through native tokens or ERC-20 tokens.
• Backend confirmation of on-chain payment events.
• Author platform billing with storage quota and plan features.
• Protected file access through backend verification and signed URLs.
• Likes, comments, views, reports, activity and feed pages.

Non-functional requirements

• Access checks must not rely only on frontend visibility.
• Binary files should be stored outside MongoDB.
• Smart contract deployment must be controlled and separate from application container startup.
• The frontend should remain a static SPA that can be served by nginx or static hosting.
• Documentation should be deployable as a standalone static site.
• The system should support multiple EVM networks through configurable RPC endpoints and deployment registry records.

Security constraints

• A reader cannot download protected files without a valid backend-verified access state.
• JWT sessions expire and stale sessions are cleared on the frontend.
• Smart contract payment confirmation validates receipt logs rather than trusting a user-provided transaction hash.
• Platform and reader subscription managers are deployed through manual GitHub Actions workflows rather than runtime containers.

Operational requirements

• Frontend and documentation builds must remain static artifacts.
• Backend deployment must not require contract private keys at runtime.
• Smart contract deployment must be repeatable per EVM network.
• Object storage keys must allow author-level accounting and cleanup.
• Public documentation must not require application secrets or runtime environment variables.

UX requirements

• A stale wallet session must not be shown as active.
• Backend and network errors should be distinguishable from user input errors.
• Locked content should expose enough context to explain which access tier is required.
• Author tools should show storage usage, billing state and access-policy composition without requiring blockchain explorer lookups.