Music was never supposed to be an NFT.
A founder's thesis, by Melk (Stephen Heuvel), founder of Riffdex. Follow me on X: @MelkRhm
I believed that strongly enough to spend the last 24 months, solo, building an entire protocol around a better idea: the AFT, the Audio Fungible Token. This is the thesis behind it, and what "AFTs, not NFTs" actually means.
The problem nobody fixes
Start with how broken the economics are.
Artists earn roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. That is hundreds of plays to make a single dollar, and only after everyone else in the chain takes their cut. The fans who discover a song first, share it, and turn it into a hit own zero percent of the upside they created. And royalties themselves are opaque, paid quarterly, and impossible to trade.
Everyone wins except the two people who matter most: the artist and the fan.
NFTs were the wrong shape
NFTs were supposed to fix this. They didn't, and the reason is simple: they are the wrong shape for music.
An NFT is a one-of-one collectible, priced by scarcity. But a song's value was never scarce. It is fungible and recurring. It lives in streams, in royalties, in a fandom that compounds over years. You cannot capture a recurring, shared, cash-flowing thing inside a format built for a single rare object. Scarcity is the wrong model for music, full stop.
The AFT
So I built the right one: the AFT, the Audio Fungible Token.
An AFT is a divisible ERC20 token where three things are true at once. Holding it unlocks the music, so access is simply your balance. Every trade pays the artist automatically, because the transfer fee is the royalty, built into the token itself. And it trades in a real, liquid market built specifically for it.
Fungible. Royalty-bearing. Liquid. That is what a song was always meant to be.
The split is the point
Here is where it gets fair.
Every trade of an AFT pays 70% to the artist and 30% to the fans who stake it. The artist earns on the first sale and on every single trade after it, forever, on-chain, with no distributor and no quarterly wait. And for the first time, fans hold something that pays them back. Believing in an artist and being rewarded for it become the same act.
The hard part I had to solve
This is the part that makes it genuinely new.
The feature that makes an AFT fair, paying the artist on every transfer, makes it a fee-on-transfer token. And fee-on-transfer tokens break generic AMMs. Exchanges like Uniswap assume that what you send is what arrives, so they double-charge these tokens, misprice them, or fail the trade outright. That is exactly why "just list music on a normal exchange" has never worked.
So I built a fee-on-transfer-native AMM from scratch. It settles on the real balance actually received and charges the royalty exactly once. One fair fee, never two. It is the same trusted constant-product math the whole industry relies on, re-derived around one honest change.
This isn't a whitepaper. It's built.
I want to be clear about the stage, because talk is cheap and building is not.
This is seven working smart contracts: the AFT itself, a factory so any artist can launch their own, a presale that sets the first price and seeds the pool, the fee-on-transfer-native AMM, a router, and a manipulation-resistant TWAP oracle. The full test suite is green.
Built to protect holders
Trust on Riffdex is not a promise. It is enforced in the code, where it cannot be quietly changed later.
The artist's royalty address is immutable. A song's pool can only open at the price the fans paid in the presale, so no insider can form a market ahead of the crowd and dump on them. And the oracle can never freeze a pool. Anti-rug by construction, not by press release.
What's next
Ahead of me: a security audit, deployment on Base, and the app that puts all of this in the hands of artists and fans. I am also looking for a technical co-founder to build it with me.
I am building Riffdex, the home of AFTs. If a fee-on-transfer-native music exchange sounds like your kind of hard problem, my DMs are open.
Remember the term
AFT. Audio Fungible Token.
Music assets were never NFTs. They are AFTs, and you saw it here first. I am building this in the open, so follow along.
Riffdex. The home of AFTs.
Written by Melk — artist name of Stephen Heuvel, a self-taught builder and musician from Suriname, and the founder of Riffdex. I was one of the first artists to turn my music into an NFT (over 200 sold in a single day). It never felt right, so I spent the next two years building what music actually deserved: the AFT. Follow the build: @MelkRhm · Riffdex on X · Farcaster
Official article: https://blog.riffdex.io/afts-not-nfts
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