TrueCollective

Demo

About

TrueCollective is a live transfer-coupled rights runtime on Hedera Testnet. When a RightsNFT moves from A to B, A’s free access ends, B’s begins, eligible purchased licenses remain valid, and future revenue is allocated to the creator and B. AI clients can discover, purchase with native HBAR through x402 and Blocky402, decrypt, and analyze licensed data through MCP. When ownership changes, separate mechanisms are still required to determine how the previous owner’s access should be revoked, how already-purchased usage rights should be handled, and who should receive future revenue. ERC-721 itself does not define rules for these usage rights or revenue distribution. Now that the initial hype around the NFT market has cooled, we believe the key question is: 「what kind of ongoing utility can NFTs provide beyond simply holding and trading them?」 Connecting the record of ownership to actual usable rights and recurring revenue is the starting point of TrueCollective. TrueCollective is a “transfer-aware rights runtime” that connects ownership, usage rights, and revenue to redefine what NFTs can represent. It manages an owner’s privileges and a purchaser’s usage rights separately, and updates each of them according to predefined rules whenever the NFT is transferred. When an NFT is transferred from A to B, A’s free access as the owner is revoked, while B’s free access becomes active. At the same time, usage rights that were purchased under terms allowing them to survive a transfer remain valid within their defined conditions, such as expiration dates or remaining usage counts. Revenue from new payments made after the transfer is then distributed between the Creator and the new owner, B. Revenue allocations that were already finalized remain unchanged. This makes it possible to preserve a purchaser’s existing usage rights while transferring the owner’s privileges and the right to receive future revenue. This mechanism is implemented on Hedera using two independent permission-management systems. Owner Epoch updates owner privileges on every transfer, while License Epoch and Rights Receipt manage the conditions and revocation of purchased usage rights. The Access Gateway checks on-chain state every time an access request is made and controls whether decryption key material is provided to a client that satisfies the required conditions. In addition, x402-based native-HBAR payments are combined with Privy wallet functionality, enabling external AI clients to discover, purchase, and decrypt data through MCP. Verified live on 2026-09-08: an MCP-connected Claude Code session discovered the asset, paid 0.1 testnet HBAR, decrypted nine rows and correctly answered a question about the data. Our initial use case is managing licensing and revenue distribution between companies that own IP, such as characters or brands, and companies that want to use that IP. For example, imagine Company A owns a character IP and sells Company B, an apparel company, a license to use that character for a specific product series for six months. Company B can access authorized official images and design assets and use them for product development. Later, if responsibility for managing the IP moves from Company A to Company C due to a business transfer or similar transaction, the license already purchased by Company B can remain valid until its expiration date, as long as the contract specifies that it survives the transfer. Meanwhile, revenue from newly sold licenses is redirected to the new managing entity, Company C, while preserving the predefined allocation to the Creator. Revenue distributions that were already finalized in the past are not changed. TrueCollective provides the infrastructure required for this type of operation: even when the company managing an IP changes, previously authorized usage continues while future access privileges and revenue distribution switch to the new manager. By associating the NFT with the entity currently responsible for managing the IP while recording purchased licenses separately, the system can treat a change in management independently from existing usage permissions. For this MVP, we focus on the foundational mechanisms required to support this model: access control for digital assets, usage rights with expiration dates or usage limits, persistence of purchased rights after ownership transfer, and switching the recipient of future revenue. Legal permissions for commercialization, advertising use, and similar activities are assumed to be governed by separate contractual agreements. Transferring the NFT itself does not automatically transfer copyright, nor does the system attempt to automatically control how an asset is used after it has been obtained.

How it's made

TrueCollective combines rights management through EVM contracts deployed on Hedera Testnet with an off-chain Access Gateway API server, a web application, and an MCP interface for external AI clients. At the core of the design is the independent management of two types of permissions using separate generation counters. RightsNFT, an ERC-721 contract, increments the Owner Epoch whenever the NFT is transferred. Meanwhile, RightsRegistry maintains a separate License Epoch for policy changes and revocation. Because these two epochs are managed independently, a purchased Rights Receipt configured to survive ownership transfers does not become invalid simply because the NFT owner changes. Rights Receipts use EIP-712 typed data to bind usage rights to the purchaser, target asset, permitted operations, policy, expiration date, maximum usage count, and information recorded at the time of purchase. Individual usage events are recorded separately from the purchase itself. This allows a single usage right to support multiple accesses while preventing the replay of the same payment proof from being treated as a new purchase. The Access Gateway is built with Hono on Cloudflare Workers. When evaluating an access request, it reads the current owner, epoch values, and receipt status directly from the blockchain. A self-hosted Graph Node indexes events for asset discovery and audit interfaces, but indexed data is not used as the source of truth for authorization decisions. To prevent concurrent reuse of the same usage right, the system combines Durable Object-based coordination, unique constraints in PostgreSQL, and on-chain usage records. For payments, TrueCollective uses native HBAR through x402 and the Blocky402 facilitator. Hedera acts as the shared state layer for ownership, usage rights, and revenue distribution. Privy provides signing functionality for both the embedded wallet used in the web application and the server wallet used for MCP-based payments. Spending limits and callable operations are restricted through policy controls, and the architecture is designed so that the Gateway never holds the raw private key of the payment wallet. Encrypted datasets are decrypted on the client side. Before releasing the required key material, the Gateway's KeyGate verifies that the requester has the necessary access rights. The MCP server exposes the following tools: `discover_assets` `buy_access` `decrypt_content` Actual data analysis is performed by the connected AI client itself. During development, we used Spec Kit extensively for requirements definition and system design. We also standardized the implementation around shared TypeScript domain definitions and API types generated from OpenAPI. The development process is fundamentally based on Spec-Driven Development (SDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD). For validation, we focus not only on the expected end-to-end flow from purchase through ownership transfer, but also on abuse scenarios such as reusing a previous owner's session after transfer, applying usage rights to a different asset, and concurrently consuming the same usage right multiple times.