About

Affiliate marketing without the middleman tax.

Njord is what affiliate marketing looks like when the payment rail is a smart contract instead of a billing department. Companies fund campaigns in USDC. Conversions settle in roughly three seconds. The fee structure is 2.5% to the protocol, 1% to the bridge that handled the fiat side — published, on-chain, immutable.

What is broken about affiliate marketing today

The traditional affiliate-network stack has a few specific failures that everyone in the industry knows but nobody fixes because the incumbents profit from them.

NET-30, NET-60, NET-90. Affiliates do the work in week one and get paid in month three. The network earns float on every commission in flight.
Opaque tracking. Numbers come out of a proprietary dashboard and there is no second party to verify them against.
15–30% network fees. A meaningful slice of every commission is consumed by the platform between the buyer and the affiliate.
Fraud without accountability. Cookie-stuffing, bot traffic, and self-referrals erode trust; honest affiliates are the ones who pay the reputation cost.
Regional gatekeeping. KYC-heavy platforms exclude qualified affiliates in entire countries because the onboarding pipeline is built for one jurisdiction.

What Njord chooses instead

Njord is a set of Anchor programs on Solana plus the SDKs around them. The choices we made, and why:

Escrow before promotion, payout on conversion

A campaign is not real until it has been funded. The on-chain escrow is the campaign's credibility — affiliates do not have to take a budget number on faith. When a conversion is recorded, the contract releases funds immediately and there is no path for the company to revoke them.

Fees as a published constant, not a negotiation

Protocol fee: 2.5% of the commission. Bridge fee: 1% of the commission. Campaign creation: 0.1 SOL. Those numbers live in the program. Governance can adjust them within bounded ranges (protocol fee 0.5%–5%) and only through the public proposal process.

Solana as a deliberate choice

Affiliate marketing is a high-throughput, low-value-per-tx workload. A typical attribution costs roughly $0.00025 in Solana fees. The same workload on a chain with $0.50 transaction fees would refund itself: the chain fee would exceed the commission on small conversions. Solana's fee profile is what lets the per-click economics work at all.

Reputation tiers instead of bureaucratic KYC

Affiliates start at the "New" tier with a 7-day hold period. As they accumulate clean conversions and (optionally) stake NJORD, they move up: Verified (3 days), Trusted (24 hours), Elite (real-time). The tier system replaces a KYC desk with on-chain history.

Bridge operators as an open market

Fiat is not the chain's job. Bridge operators handle card payments and bank withdrawals, earn 1% of every commission they process, and stake NJORD into one of four tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) to unlock higher daily-volume caps. Anyone with the bridge SDK can become an operator in any region.

What is built today

The Solana programs are deployed on devnet under program ID Hm5WfS2KL4UPaUqVJ3vadCuPMCftw2oybqvpDr7fn9Hv. The TypeScript SDK, React hooks package, bridge-operator SDK, and GraphQL indexer are open in the cryptuon/njord workspace, MIT licensed. Mainnet is pending; the program ID is reserved.

The dashboard at njord.cryptuon.com exposes campaign browsing, affiliate link generation, conversion tracking, and payout history against the devnet deployment. Bridges and operators can register and exercise the full lifecycle end-to-end.

Who is building it

Njord is a project of cryptuon. The team builds on-chain infrastructure with a bias toward making the boring parts of business — invoicing, reconciliation, attribution, payout — programmable and instant. Njord is the affiliate-marketing instantiation of that thesis.

How to engage

If you are a company that already pays affiliates and you would like the float and 15–30% spread back: clone the repo, create a campaign on devnet, and connect a bridge. If you are a creator or publisher: read the affiliates guide, browse open campaigns from the dashboard, and start earning in seconds rather than months. If you run payment infrastructure: the bridge SDK and Docker compose file are the place to start.

For security issues, email support@cryptuon.com or open a private security advisory on GitHub.