How the pieces fit together

One record, many surfaces

The simplest way to understand Suede is as a hub and spokes. The hub is the rights record: a registered work with a fingerprint, a timestamp, a contributor list, permissions, and payment splits. The spokes are product surfaces that create, display, license, or monetize that record.

This is why the ecosystem can span things as different as a guitar practice app and an agent payment endpoint without falling apart. They all read from and write to the same idea of ownership.

The spine: registration

When a work is registered through the Workspace or the IP Registry, Suede stores three things that matter:

• Provenance: an exact-file fingerprint and a timestamp, so there is a durable record that this file existed in this form at this moment, claimed by this creator.
• Rights: contributors, splits, and machine-readable permissions describing what is allowed, from personal listening to sync licensing to AI training.
• Routing: where money goes. Splits are defined once and applied to every transaction that touches the work.

Registration is the moment ownership attaches. Everything downstream assumes it.

The human surfaces

Suede Social, Strumly, and Muse are where people actually spend time. Social is distribution and community for registered work. Strumly and Muse are the practice room: an AI guitar coach and a musician companion that meet creators early, while the work is still being made.

The point of owning these surfaces rather than only integrating with others: the moment of creation is the best time to capture provenance. A riff worked out in a practice app, a demo shared to a feed, both can flow into registration without a separate chore.

The machine surfaces

Agent Studio and the x402 endpoints are where software does the buying. An agent discovers a Suede endpoint, reads a price it can parse, signs a USDC payment on Base, and receives the result in the same exchange. No invoice, no account manager, no license PDF.

The x402 protocol is the payment rail: an open standard for paying over HTTP. Suede treats it as plumbing. What matters is what arrives on the other side, work that carries its ownership with it, and creators who get paid through their defined splits at the moment of the transaction.

Suede also publishes machine-readable manifests, an x402 manifest and an agent card, at well-known URLs so that agents can discover what Suede offers without a human pointing them at it.

The capital surface

Vaults connect supporter capital to creator rights with visible terms: target, term, revenue share, and cap are published before anyone allocates anything. Vaults wrap rights, they do not replace them. The creator's registration and splits stay intact underneath. The vaults docs page covers the mechanics.

Why this shape

Three properties fall out of putting the record at the center:

1. Nothing needs to be reconciled. Payment, rights, and provenance reference the same record, so there is no quarterly statement that disagrees with a contract that disagrees with a registration.
2. Machines and humans read the same truth. A licensing agent and a human A&R see the same permissions and the same splits.
3. New surfaces are cheap to add. Anything that can read a rights record can join the ecosystem, which is why the surface list keeps growing without the core changing.

Boundaries worth knowing

The system records claims and routes payments. It does not adjudicate disputes between claimants, and a fingerprint proves a file existed, not that no earlier version existed elsewhere. Suede is infrastructure for honest actors and evidence against dishonest ones, not a court.