Money moves only when every gate says yes
Most of these gates exist to say no. A contest that can't be read clearly voids and refunds rather than guessing. A payout without tax and identity records on file is denied by default. A settlement that arrives twice moves money once. Here's the machine, and here's what it refuses to do.
PLLAY is in a demo phase — contests and credits run end to end, and every control described here is live against them, but cash rails are switched off at the database level. This is the machine as built, before it moves anyone's money.
Seven gates. Any one of them can stop it.
Watch what happens when something is wrong — a blocked location, footage that never resolves, a duplicate settlement, a payout missing its paperwork. Refusing correctly is the harder half of handling money.
Location is checked against three independent signals — network, account, and billing. Any one of them disagreeing stops the entry, and every check is written to an audit log.
Illustration of the enforcement path — not a live transaction feed.
Constraints, not promises
A policy can lapse and a code path can be bypassed. These are neither — they're conditions the database itself refuses to violate, which is why we can state them this plainly.
Settlement is idempotent because the payout record is unique in the database. A second settlement returns the first one's result and moves nothing — enforced by the schema, not by application logic that could be bypassed.
Platform fee, creator share and fan payout are checked against the pool total on every settlement write. A split that doesn't reconcile to the cent cannot be stored at all.
Money movements are mirrored into a double-entry ledger where debits and credits are summed at commit time. A transaction whose entries don't cancel out is rejected — the write never lands.
A job queries live production every day for any cancelled contest holding an unrefunded stake. If it ever finds one, the build fails and the team is alerted — we don't wait for someone to report it.
Fail closed, every time
Eligibility is derived from network location, the state on the account, and billing details. Any one of them disagreeing blocks the action — the check fails closed rather than guessing. Every check writes an audit record, and accounts are re-verified on a schedule, not just at signup.
Where PLLAY is availableNo withdrawal proceeds without a verified identity record — the gate denies by default rather than allowing and reviewing later. Verification runs through Persona, and the platform refuses to start if it is ever pointed at real money while identity checks are still in demo mode.
Deposit limits, reality checks and self-exclusion are enforced where the money is written, not in the interface — a blocked purchase is rejected by the ledger itself. Lowering a limit takes effect at once; raising one waits. Once self-exclusion is active, no administrator can shorten or lift it.
Responsible play toolsWinning has to mean you were right
A prediction market is only worth entering if the other side isn't rigged. Some of these controls block outright; others route to a human. We've been deliberate about which is which.
A payout account can't be shared across multiple identities. That's a uniqueness constraint in the database, so funnelling winnings from several accounts into one destination fails at the write.
Blocked at insert by a trigger that runs before anything else can touch the row.
When a winning side looks connected to the creator, settlement routes to review rather than to a payout. The money doesn't move first and get clawed back — it never moves.
A daily job looks for accounts that repeatedly take opposite sides of the same market, or that share a device under different names, and routes them to a human review queue. Fingerprinting isn't strong enough to ban on automatically, so it doesn't.
We never see your card
Card details are entered on the payment processor's own hosted page and never reach our servers. There is no card field anywhere in our product, which is the only version of this claim worth making.
Checkout and payouts run through PayPal's hosted flow. PayPal is certified to PCI DSS Level 1 — that's their certification, and the reason it protects you here is that we're never in the path of the card number.
The platform runs on Supabase and Vercel, who maintain their own independent security attestations and handle encryption in transit and at rest. We rely on that; we don't claim it as ours.
On top of that, the fields that would hurt most if exposed — tax identifiers, streaming account tokens — are encrypted by us at the column level and readable only by internal services.
What we collectPLLAY Vision AI settles contests from the video itself — the scoreboard, the final banner, the victory screen. When the read isn't conclusive the system holds for review or voids and refunds. It is built so a bad read never mis-pays. How skill scoring works · Official contest rules
What we don't claim
Any company can publish the first half of this page. This is the half you can hold us to — the gaps as they stand today, in our own words, before someone else finds them.
We hold no independent security certification. Our infrastructure providers hold theirs, and that is their credential, not ours. We intend to pursue formal attestation as we scale, and we'll say so here when it exists — not before.
Creator payouts require a compliance clearance recorded by an administrator. That is a person confirming a check, not an automated screen against published sanctions lists. Wiring a screening provider is required work before real-money launch.
The requirement is enforced, but the verification behind it currently auto-approves while the platform is pre-launch. It cannot be pointed at real money in that state — the system refuses to start if the two ever disagree.
The platform is in a demo phase. Credits and contest mathematics run end to end, and every control described above is live against them, but cash rails are switched off at the database level. Everything here is the machine we built before turning them on.
This list shrinks by shipping, not by editing.
Reviewing PLLAY for a partnership?
Publishers, platforms and investors get the same enforcement path described here, and we're happy to walk a technical team through it in detail.