01
Gate
Meter and gate access to what you sell — subscriptions, entitlements, metered usage. The paywall is a rule the system enforces, not a setting it can quietly drift past.
Auditable payment & paywall infrastructure
Money handled with the discretion it deserves.
Sterling gates access, settles on any rail — Stripe, Plaid, ACH — and collects what is owed. What it will not do: overcharge, hide a fee, or pursue a disputed debt. Every move is written to a tamper-evident record, independent of who holds the money.
Discretion, by construction.
Why it matters
Payment systems ask you to trust them.
This one lets you verify.
In most money movement, the ledger is written by whoever holds the money — and the customer is asked to take it on faith. Sterling writes an independent, tamper-evident record of every charge, fee, and settlement. What happened stops being a matter of trust, and becomes a matter of record.
How the record is kept →How it works
Gate. Settle. Prove.
Three responsibilities, each governed by construction — so the system cannot take an action it is not permitted to take.
02
Settle
Take payment on any rail — Stripe, Plaid, ACH — behind one governed interface. Charges are bounded to what was agreed; a fee that was never disclosed cannot be applied.
03
Prove
Every gate, charge, and settlement is hash-chained to a tamper-evident record. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is reversed without leaving a trace that anyone with the record can check.
VThe agent on the account
Meet Vig
Tough. Fair. Governed.
Vig works the account so a person does not have to — and works it inside rules it cannot step outside of.
Vig is the agent Sterling puts on an account: presenting what is owed, taking payment, and following up. It is built to be firm without being predatory.
By design, Vig cannot pursue a debt that is disputed, cannot apply a fee that was not disclosed, and cannot charge past the amount agreed. Those are not policies it is asked to remember — they are constraints it is unable to violate, and every action it takes is written to the record.
The result is collection you can defend: firm where it should be, and provably fair everywhere else.
Where it is used
One money layer, several jobs.
Subscription paywalls
Gate access and bill recurring plans with entitlements the system enforces directly.
Accounts receivable
Invoice, settle, and reconcile with an independent record of every movement.
Collections
Recover what is owed — firm, disclosed, and provably within the rules.
Agentic commerce
Let agents transact on bounded authority, so autonomy never means unaccountable spend.
Assurance
Accountable by construction.
Sterling's record runs on ArkHive, ZagAIrot's governed, tamper-evident audit-memory — a production hash-chain of over 2.29 million verified blocks. Accountability is not a report generated after the fact; it is the way the system is built.
On certifications, we speak plainly. A certification is earned through audit — and until it is earned, we do not claim it. What follows is exactly where each item stands today.
Tamper-evident audit recordLive
SOC 2 Type IIIn progress
PCI DSS scopeIn progress
FDCPA-compliant by designBy design
GDPR-aligned data handlingAligned
SOC 2 and PCI DSS are audited certifications we are actively pursuing, not credentials we hold. FDCPA is a law Sterling is built to comply with — there is no such thing as an "FDCPA certificate."
The next move