Background

Currently, only payments originating from the council are actually treated as inbound payments for the channel on the My Payments page, in the sense that payments from other sources will not be displayed or explained, and the final balance the viewer sees cannot be accounted for purely from the current payment overview. Keep in mind: anyone can currently send a payment also to channel accounts and thus change the balance, but not natively in Atlas.

This kind of payment is actually quite useful to support, it for example allows one of tips from consumers, or payments from gateways to creators, where you can avoid having to intertwine the payment bureaucracy of the council with the frequency, metadata convention and other objectives of ton of different gateways. Obviously, once an app gets to a certain level of scale, it will run into the scalability issue with payments, in which case allowing non-council Merkle proof based payouts would be a good idea.

Dependency

Joystream/joystream#4507

Proposal

Semantic payments

Add a new support for displaying payment events from transmitted over member_remarks, augmented with payments as described in dependent issue. While chain level actor is membership, seems like at least three kinds of payment modes make sense

• payment from member representing a gateway: depends on #atlas as first class, with room for some sort of explainer or linking to resources external to Atlas to explain payment.
• payment from member as a channel wide tip
• payment from member as a tip associated with a specific video

Since effort is quite low we may as well support all three in one go, to unlock future nice product enhancements for Atlas.

Raw payments

We can of course not prevent other deposits into the channel account, there may be many weird edge cases where one could funnel money into an account from weird sources. The most obvious case which may be worth treating explicitly would be a simple balance transfer from another raw account. I am not sure if its worth caring about at this point.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Asana task by Unito