Know your caller.
Cryptographic proof, not promises.

What v4call gives you

Step 1 — get a Hive account

A Hive account costs 3 HIVE to register on-chain (this exists to slow down spam). There are several services that will create one for free; the one currently used for testing is signup.hive.io.

A hosted onboarding service called hive-gate is on the roadmap so that v4call operators can offer one-click signups to their users.

Step 2 — log in

Log in with your Hive username and your posting private key. The posting key is the right level of authority for messaging — it cannot move funds.

The key stays in your browser’s memory for the session; it is used locally to decrypt incoming messages and to sign outgoing ones. The server never receives the private key.

Login form — username + posting key

Step 3 — the main layout

After login you land in the lobby. The lobby is local to the node you logged in on; rooms, calls and DMs work across the federation.

Default main page after login

Lobby — gated by conditions you set

The lobby is a single public chat on each node. An admin can set conditions for posting — for example, “account must hold at least 10 CNOOBS tokens”. By design the lobby is local-only; it does not federate.

Example: only accounts holding 10+ CNOOBS can post. noblemage passes; testin (4 CNOOBS) does not.

Rooms — ephemeral, encrypted, exportable

A room is ephemeral. If every user leaves, the room and its history are gone. Anyone joining later can only read messages that were encrypted to their key.

A room can be exported and later imported into a new room. Because the messages were encrypted per-user, a third party who imports the file still cannot decrypt anything that wasn’t addressed to them.

Create a room and invite at the same time

In the Create Room tab, enter a room name. If the name is available, toggle on at least one user from the online list (works across the federation) and click create and invite.

Create-and-invite from the online list

If the invitee has no invite fee (or you’re on their friends list)

The invitee sees a simple accept/decline popup — no payment.

Cross-fed room invite, no fee required

If the invitee charges an invite fee

When a target user has an invite fee set, the chat & info box on the right shows an Invite button with the fee on it.

Invite button shows the fee the recipient requires

The same UI is easier to see in a wider room view. Look at the box at the bottom of the participants panel:

Bottom of the participants panel — type the handle you want to invite

To invite a user that charges a fee, type their handle into that field:

• @username — if they’re on the same node
• @username@server — if they’re on a federated node (e.g. @noblemage@hive-book.com)

Press the invite button next to the field and a pay-for-invite popup will appear.

The popup lists the payment options the recipient accepts — e.g. 0.1 HBD or 1 TEST. Token options only appear if you actually hold that token. Pick one, press pay & invite, and Hive Keychain pops up to sign the payment.

Choose a token the recipient accepts, then Keychain signs

The invited user sees a paid-invite popup:

Paid invite popup on the receiving side

If they decline, the fee is refunded (a “decline and keep fee” option is on the roadmap). If they accept, they enter the room — and from there the Toggle/Send vs All encryption model from the callout above applies.

File transfer — IPFS, your choice of provider

v4call itself does not store any files. User-to-user media (pictures, audio, video, text, PDFs) is uploaded to an IPFS pinning service that you choose. Today there are two compatible options: Pinata (easy, free 1 GB tier) and IPFS-Gate (self-hostable, Hive-payment-gated).

Pick your storage backend

In the storage section, click change and pick the backend.

Storage backend picker

Option A — Pinata (easy path)

Pinata (pinata.cloud) gives you a free 1 GB account. At app.pinata.cloud/developers/api-keys click + New Key, and under Legacy Endpoints › Pinning tick pinFileToIPFS — that’s the only permission you need to upload from v4call.

You will get a key triple that looks roughly like this:

API Key:    6caf48686e6f94f1234b
API Secret: 434cf25ca73870d816154140748328849007092b325150f68074ec1d4e3cc1ae
JWT:        eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VySW5mb3JtYXR...glvAaO_-8YTRb-5u4IEBU9bPskYyprJ9peqiKhU-jcY

Example only — this JWT has been revoked. Generate your own at pinata.cloud.

Paste your JWT into v4call and press test:

JWT test inside v4call

Once the JWT is set, uploading is one click: press Encrypt & Upload. As long as you have storage quota at Pinata, the file is encrypted in your browser, the ciphertext is uploaded, and a link is shared into the room.

Encrypt & Upload from a room

No Keychain payment prompt — Pinata is paid out-of-band

Pinata admin panel (optional, with a wider key)

v4call has an IPFS › Pinata admin tab. To use it, create a second Pinata key with these permissions:

• Legacy Endpoints › Pinning: pinFileToIPFS, unpin, hashMetadata
• Legacy Endpoints › Data: pinList, userPinnedDataTotal

pinFileToIPFS uploads · unpin is the one that must work or you bill forever on orphans · hashMetadata renames/tags pins · pinList powers the admin table (rate-limited ~30/min, page it) · userPinnedDataTotal is the usage/quota readout.

Admin tab, not yet logged in

Press Management Key, paste the JWT

Pinata admin panel inside v4call

Option B — IPFS-Gate (self-host path)

IPFS-Gate is sister software (MIT, very early concept stage) that lets you run your own pinning service where users pay directly on Hive. The current proof-of-concept accepts an upload and hosts it for a fixed time window in exchange for 1 TEST token.

In v4call, pick a user in the room, choose IPFS-Gate as the backend, and upload. The file is encrypted in-browser to the recipient’s posting public key before it ever leaves your machine.

File picked, ready to pay-and-upload

Pay with Keychain, and once the payment confirms the upload starts:

Payment cleared — upload in progress

When it’s done, the file appears in the room. Pictures, audio, video, text and PDF all preview in-line; download is one click.

Uploaded file appears in the room

v4call also has a simple management view tied to your Hive account showing your IPFS-Gate uploads, share links, remaining TTL and an unpin early button.

v4call › IPFS-Gate management

Missed-call refund

If you set a ring rate, callers pay the fee from escrow before their call rings you. If the call never connects — you were offline, or you simply didn’t answer — you see a missed-call alert with two choices: refund the caller, or keep the ring fee.

Missed-call alert: refund or keep the fee

Announce yourself — one signed Hive post

User-announce generates and posts your v4call conditions to the Hive blockchain. It is one signed Hive post that every app can read — v4call rates, paid-invite offers, Nostr keys, Bitcoin / Lightning addresses, SSH key, contact details. Tick only the sections you want; the rest emit no block at all.

The post title is always user-announce; tags are user-announce, hive, v4call, nostr, bitcoin. Each section is its own versioned block, so apps read what they understand and ignore the rest. Apps always read your most recent post with that title.

The user-announce screen — sections on the left, generated Hive post body on the right

IDENTITY (always in the post)

Enter your Hive username. If the Hive Keychain extension is installed, you’ll see a green “Post to Hive enabled” confirmation under the field. The username appears in every post, so this block can’t be turned off.

V4call service

This block tells readers which v4call-node you call home and which escrow account that node controls — the account where your paid calls, DMs and invites settle. Check the node’s own announcer post on Hive (or its /api/info endpoint) for its current escrow account.

There isn’t yet a standard federation-hosting rule for the escrow account — that’s on the TODO list.

V4call — set your rates for callers

Expand this section and tick the include checkbox on the right of the title to add the rates block to your post.

Empty rates section — no tokens added, no custom lists yet

This block tells callers what they pay you for each kind of contact: invite fee, offer fee, DM fee, plus voice and video (ring / connect / per-hour rate / minimum deposit). Any field left at 0 means free.

Priority is the order on screen — the resolver walks the list top-to-bottom, and the first match wins:

1. [BLOCKED] (pinned first) — security gate. Comma-separated usernames go in USERS; if blank, nobody is blocked. Set an optional BLOCK MESSAGE the blocked caller will see. ALLOW-IF-TOKEN is a bypass — if the caller holds the named token, the block does not apply.
2. Middle rules — your token rates and any custom lists, in the order you drag them. Drag the ⠇⠇ handle to reorder. First match wins.
3. [LIST:default] (pinned last) — the last-resort fallback that catches everyone else.

A WHO PAYS WHAT tester at the bottom resolves a sample caller against your live order before you post, so you can see who would pay what without committing anything to chain.

Token rates

Inside the priority list you can add token-specific pricing. Click + Add token to open a token block.

A token block — SYMBOL, bypass-block toggle, and the full fee schedule for callers paying in that token

Enter the token SYMBOL. The bypass block checkbox lets holders of this token through the [BLOCKED] gate above. Then set the per-token fees (invite / offer / DM / voice / video). You can add more than one token block — one for each currency you want to accept.

Creating your own token on Hive currently costs about $5 for a basic token (no staking) and $40–50 for a stake-enabled one. See hive-engine.com for the current price.

Custom lists

Custom lists let you carve out a group of users that get different rates from everyone else — family, friends, work contacts, paying subscribers, etc. Click + Add list.

A custom list — name it, drop usernames in, set this group’s rates

Give the list a name (e.g. family, work), enter the usernames comma-separated, and fill in the fee schedule. Lists higher in the priority order match first. You can create as many lists as you like.

Lists here are single 24/7 windows. Multi-time-window and day-of-week splits were a rate-editor.html feature that hasn’t been ported to user-announce.html yet (known gap, on the roadmap) — rate-editor.html itself is outdated and not part of this client bundle.

Generate & post

The right-hand column — OUTPUT — Hive post body — shows the post that will be written to Hive. Press Generate to preview, Copy to grab the text, or Post to Hive to sign and publish via Hive Keychain. Use Load from Hive to pull your last announce back in for editing.

A filled-in example — rates set, a custom “fwend” list added, default fallback rates entered

Other sections on the same page — Nostr, Bitcoin, Lightning, SSH public key — work the same way: tick include, fill in the fields, and they join the post. Leave them off and they emit nothing.

Federation — one network, many nodes

Federation is optional. Turn it on and users on your node can see, call and invite users on the other federated nodes you trust. The same Hive identity works everywhere — @alice@node.v4call.com and @alice@hive-book.com are the same person on Hive.

Federation runs over a direct server-to-server WebSocket link — the primary, always-on transport. It carries everything: presence, DMs, calls, rooms and payments.

Nostr runs alongside it as an optional layer. Each node publishes to a small set of Nostr relays for two jobs: fast peer discovery (finding other nodes in seconds instead of waiting on a periodic blockchain scan) and cross-server presence (seeing who’s online elsewhere). As of the latest build it can also act as a fallback transport for DMs and file attachments when the direct WebSocket link is down or disabled — so a free or paid DM to someone on another node can still get through over the relays. It’s off by default and entirely optional; calls and rooms always use the WebSocket link.

Escrow platform fee

Each v4call-node may take a small percentage of escrow transactions as a platform fee. The fee is set by that node’s operator and varies per node.

Sibling projects

v4call started as one project; it has since been decoupled into focused pieces (see Run your own), plus two more that grew alongside it because they made the rest of the stack possible. All are MIT licensed.

Both projects exist because v4call needs them: IPFS-Gate gives users a pay-to-pin storage option that doesn’t depend on a single SaaS; nGate makes it possible to know which federation peers are economically committed before trusting them.

Run your own copy

v4call is now three independent pieces. This page is v4call-app — just the client screens, no server process, no money key. It connects to whichever v4call-node you point it at (this copy defaults to node.v4call.com).

git clone https://github.com/CompleteNoobs/v4call-app
cd v4call-app
# serve this folder with any static file server
# (nginx, Caddy, GitHub Pages, ...) — see walkthrough.wiki

Point this client at a different node any time from the login screen’s v4call node field (defaults to node.v4call.com), or seed it ahead of time via select.html’s node field — both write the same localStorage['v4call:node'] key that nodeBase() reads.

Trading pair for the test token used in demos: hive-engine.com/trade/TEST.

All pages on this server

v4call-app is a bundle of standalone HTML pages — the client (desktop + mobile), a layout/node picker, and the operator tool pages used to run a node. Every page below lives in this same folder; open any of them directly.

For users

For node operators

The operator pages sign with your Hive key locally (via Keychain or paste) — the key never reaches any v4call-node.