How On-Chain Wallet Top-Ups and Token Billing Work
TL;DR:
- AIOZ Stream bills through a wallet you fund with AIOZ tokens, not a card. No card network, no merchant account, no monthly invoice.
- Deposits convert to credit at the AIOZ/USDT rate at the moment they land, and usage is deducted from that balance hourly.
- AIOZ tokens exist in more than one form: a native token on the AIOZ Network chain, plus wrapped ERC-20 and BEP-20 versions on Ethereum and BNB Chain. Sending the wrong version to the wrong address risks permanent loss, so always confirm the exact network in your own dashboard before depositing.
- Token billing has a real cost fiat billing doesn't: the value of your deposited credit can move with the market between the day you top up and the day you actually spend it.
- A prepaid, hourly-deducted balance rewards active monitoring. A wallet that runs dry mid-stream behaves differently than a card that just gets declined.
A crypto-native billing system sounds like it should be simple: send tokens, get credit, spend credit. Mechanically, it is. The details worth understanding before you fund a wallet are what happens at the moment of deposit, which version of the token you're actually supposed to send, and the one real cost this model carries that a credit card never does.
Why a decentralized platform bills through a wallet instead of a card
A traditional SaaS billing stack runs through a card network and a payment processor, both of which take a cut and both of which require the platform to hold a merchant account. That works fine at typical SaaS margins. It works less well when your unit economics are $0.02 per GB, since a 2.9% card-processing fee on a small transaction can be a meaningful chunk of the margin on that transaction. A wallet funded with the platform's own token skips the card network entirely: no processor fee, no chargeback risk, and no merchant account gatekeeping who can pay. To put the fee math in perspective: a typical 2.9% plus $0.30 card-processing fee on a $10 top-up is roughly $0.59, close to 6% of that deposit gone before a single byte of storage or delivery happens. On thin per-GB margins, that's not a rounding error, it's a meaningful share of what the platform would otherwise be able to charge. Wallet-based billing also opens the platform to creators and developers in places where a card processor or PayPal-equivalent doesn't reach, since a token deposit only requires a compatible wallet, not a bank relationship.
What actually happens when you deposit
When you create an AIOZ Stream account, a wallet address is generated for you automatically. You fund it by sending AIOZ tokens to that address, with a minimum deposit of 0.01 AIOZ; anything smaller is recorded but not credited until your cumulative deposits clear that floor. The credit you receive is calculated by multiplying the AIOZ tokens you sent by the AIOZ/USDT conversion rate at the exact moment the deposit lands, not a rate set once a day or once a month. From that point, usage across storage, delivery, and transcoding is deducted from the resulting balance hourly, with a daily usage history available so you can see exactly where the balance went. For the underlying per-GB and per-minute numbers that balance gets spent against, see our full cost breakdown.
Which AIOZ token, and why the network matters
This is the part worth being careful about. AIOZ Network's own token exists in more than one form: a native token on AIOZ Network's own Cosmos SDK-based Layer-1 chain, plus wrapped versions issued as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum and a BEP-20 token on BNB Chain. AIOZ provides a cross-chain bridge specifically to move tokens between these forms, which only exists because they aren't interchangeable by default: a wallet address on one network cannot receive a token sent from a different network.
AIOZ Stream's own payment documentation is direct about the risk here: sending anything other than the correct AIOZ token to your deposit address can result in permanent loss of funds, and the docs don't spell out which specific network's version of the token your generated deposit address expects. That's not a gap we can responsibly guess our way around, since guessing wrong in either direction could cost a reader real money. Treat it as a mandatory step, not an optional check: confirm the exact network shown for your deposit address inside your own AIOZ Stream dashboard before you send anything, every time, even if you've deposited before.
The real cost token billing adds that fiat billing doesn't
A dollar sitting in a card-linked bank account is worth a dollar tomorrow. AIOZ tokens sitting in a Stream wallet as unspent credit are not insulated from the token's market price the same way, since the conversion to credit happens once, at deposit time. In practice this means the effective per-GB cost you locked in when you funded the wallet is fixed in credit terms, but the AIOZ tokens you'd need to buy to refund that same balance later could cost more or less depending on where the token is trading when you top up again. It's not a reason to avoid the model, flat $0.02/GB pricing is still flat $0.02/GB pricing once credited, but it is a real planning consideration that a traditional monthly card invoice simply doesn't have. Teams running tight on margin should treat token volatility as a line item worth tracking, not an afterthought.
A concrete way to think about it: deposit enough AIOZ to cover $500 of expected monthly usage, and that credit is locked in at $500 regardless of what the token does afterward, since the conversion already happened. The volatility shows up on the other side of the transaction, in what it costs you to acquire the next batch of AIOZ tokens when it's time to refill. If the token has appreciated since your last deposit, refilling the same $500 of credit costs you fewer tokens than last time. If it's dropped, it costs more. Neither outcome changes what you're being charged for storage, delivery, or transcoding, only what it costs you personally to keep the wallet funded.
Keeping your wallet topped up
Because usage deducts from a prepaid balance hourly instead of accumulating into an end-of-month invoice, a wallet that runs dry behaves differently than a declined card. There's no automatic retry, no grace period built around a billing cycle, just a balance that hits zero. A few habits make this manageable: check the daily usage history regularly rather than only when something breaks, keep a buffer sized to your highest realistic delivery day rather than your average day, since delivery-heavy workloads are the ones most likely to spike unpredictably, and treat a near-empty balance as a deposit trigger rather than waiting for it to actually hit zero. If you're running anything customer-facing, it's also worth deciding in advance what should happen if a top-up is delayed, whether that means monitoring the balance yourself on a schedule or building an alert around it, rather than discovering the answer the first time a viewer hits a broken stream. None of this requires sophisticated tooling to start, even a basic script that checks the balance daily and sends an alert below a threshold covers most of the risk, well before it's worth building anything more elaborate around it.
FAQ
Do I need a crypto wallet app to use AIOZ Stream's billing?
You need a wallet capable of sending AIOZ tokens to the deposit address AIOZ Stream generates for your account, but you don't need to run AIOZ Stream itself through a wallet app. The deposit address lives inside your AIOZ Stream account; you're only using an external wallet to send funds to it.
What happens to unspent credit if I stop using AIOZ Stream?
The credited balance in your account reflects tokens already converted at deposit time, so it remains available in your account for future usage rather than expiring. Check your account's own terms for the specifics, since this is an account-balance question rather than a pricing-mechanics one.
Can I deposit more than once to top up an existing balance?
Yes. Each deposit is credited independently at the AIOZ/USDT rate active at the moment it lands, and adds to your existing balance rather than replacing it.
Is the deposit wallet address the same every time, or does it change?
The wallet is generated once when you create your account and tied to that account, not regenerated per deposit. Always copy the address directly from your own account rather than from memory or an old screenshot.
Why doesn't AIOZ Stream just accept a credit card like most SaaS platforms?
Accepting cards would mean absorbing card-network and processor fees on top of already thin per-GB margins, and would require a merchant account that excludes creators and developers without access to traditional banking. Wallet-based billing sidesteps both constraints, at the cost of the volatility consideration above.
Does billing hourly instead of monthly change how much I actually pay?
No. Hourly billing changes when usage is deducted from your balance, not the underlying $0.02/GB storage, $0.02/GB delivery, or per-minute transcoding rates. The total cost for a given amount of usage is the same either way; hourly billing just gives you more granular visibility into it.
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