The Open Audio Protocol experienced a consensus halt at ~2:00 AM PT on March 24, 2026, after the validator set dropped below the 2/3 supermajority required by CometBFT — the first of its kind in the history of the protocol.

The outage was caused by a combination of issues: a major operator’s DNS change reducing participation, another operator accidentally taking multiple validators offline, and legacy inconsistencies between consensus and application validator state.

Recovery involved coordinated validator restoration, a database migration to fix the validator set, and a protocol update to accelerate consensus rounds.

The network fully recovered by 4:47 PM PT on March 25, 2026.

Read the full postmortem: https://docs.openaudio.org/blog/postmortem-march-2026-consensus-halt/

Crate changes that.

Designed by the Audius team, Crate is a purpose-built A&R workspace that transforms demo submission and review into a structured, high-signal workflow.

Out of the box, Crate gives label teams the tools they need to triage music quickly:

• Email-free demo submission and listening
  

• Timestamped feedback with voice note support
  

• Keyboard shortcuts for rapid demo triage
  

• Multi-reviewer A&R collaboration
  

• Automated feedback delivery to artists
  

• Release-ready preparation for instant distribution to Audius and other streaming platforms

But the most powerful part of Crate isn’t just the workflow.

It’s what’s underneath it: The Open Audio Protocol.

Enter Open Audio

Alongside the launch of Crate, we’re introducing a new capability on the Open Audio Protocol called Programmable Distribution.

This feature allows developers and platforms to publish music to the network while cryptographically controlling how and where it can be accessed.

The Audius product has experimented with many forms of cryptographic access control in the past, gating music by:

• NFT ownership

• Crypto tips & payments ($AUDIO, USDC)

• Social interactions

These systems worked well for specific use cases, but one lesson became clear along the way:

Trying to design a protocol interface for every possible access rule isn’t scalable. What if an artist wants their single only streamable during a live promotion event? What if an artist wants to geofence where a song can be streamed? What if an artist wants fans to complete challenges to unlock pieces of an album?

Instead, the Open Audio Protocol takes a developer-first approach.

Rather than defining every rule on-chain, developers can program their own access logic externally while still using the protocol for distribution, indexing, and rights management.

How Programmable Distribution Works

With Programmable Distribution, a track’s metadata transaction can include access authorities: cryptographic addresses authorized to approve playback.

When streaming requests are made, validator nodes in the decentralized network verify that the request includes a valid signature from one of these authorities before serving the audio.

In simpler terms, the protocol handles the distribution and the developers control the access.

Example metadata:

entity_type: track
action: create
signer: "0x885ba66083D1ef52d5Caa8bDFFE7b66f4C21E272"

{
  "access_authorities": [
    "0xEC8babb083D1ef52d3Cbb8b211E7b66f4C21E242"
  ],
  "data": {
    "title": "Latch ft. Sam Smith",
    "owner_id": 117827
  }
}

When a track is uploaded with an access authority, the network will only stream that track if the request is signed by an authorized key.

This creates a flexible architecture where platforms can build custom access rules without modifying the protocol itself.

How Crate Uses It

In the case of Friends & Family and labels using Crate, the platform holds the signing keys that act as access authorities.

When artists submit demos:

1. Tracks are uploaded to the Open Audio Protocol

2. Streaming access is restricted to Crate via the authority key

3. A&R teams can listen, review, and collaborate inside the platform

This design provides several advantages:

• Crate doesn’t need to operate its own storage or streaming infrastructure

• All submissions live within an open music graph

• Artists maintain a clear path to release if a track is signed

From there, labels and artists have multiple options:

If a track is archived or saved for later:

Artists can remove the access authority and publish the track directly to Audius or any platform streaming from the protocol.

If a track is signed:

The label can update the track, re-program and release it directly through the label’s address on the Open Audio Protocol or other account as they see fit.

A New Infrastructure for A&R

Crate represents a new model for how music discovery and signing can work in an era of massive creative output.

Instead of fragmented inboxes and private links, A&R teams get a structured pipeline. Instead of siloed platforms, artists publish to an open protocol with programmable rights and distribution. And instead of slow, manual workflows, labels can move at the speed modern music culture demands.

We’re incredibly excited to see platforms like Crate emerge. And this is only the beginning of what developers can build on the Open Audio Protocol.

Submit Your Demo

Submit a demo to Friends & Family
friendsandfamily.crate.is/submit

Get in touch with the Crate team
jesse@audius.co

Follow Disclosure on Audius
audius.co/disclosure

Follow Friends & Family
instagram.com/disclosure_friendsandfam

Follow Audius
instagram.com/audius

Read the documentation
docs.openaudio.org/tutorials/gate-release-access

> Read https://audius.co/agents.md and build me a music streaming app that looks like Spotify, but streams from the Open Audio Protocol.

Instant and autonomous software, fueled by the “Cambrian Explosion” of coding agents in 2026, sets the stage for an increased utilization of open and block-chain native protocols. The Open Audio Protocol is the largest open and programmable music catalog in existence and is built for this moment: powering vibecoded applications and agent-native music economies.

Agents Are No Longer Just Chatbots

In recent months, we’ve gone from “AI assistants” to autonomous systems that can launch complete products, run communities, curate feeds, execute transactions, and collaborate with humans in real time. Agents can now author code, write music, and coordinate capital. And what once required full teams with venture funding to launch startups in music now takes no more than impassioned individuals with great ideas.

Through this chapter, one thing is clear: Agents need infrastructure. They need primitives to build on and interfaces to interact with each other and with humans.

If 2026 is the year agents become ubiquitous, it’s also the year we must decide what cultural primitives they are allowed to build with. Music is one of the most powerful datasets on earth. It shapes identity, movements, communities, and economies. But historically, music catalogs have been locked inside platforms: read-only, rate-limited, monetized through opaque policies, and designed primarily for mass-appeal UI.

That model does not adapt to the flexibility of the vibecoder era.

From Streaming To Programmable Catalogs

The streaming era in music was UI-first.

Platforms like Spotify won by building the best consumer experience. They made music instant and searchable. The infrastructure behind the scenes was powerful, but invisible. It existed to serve a single purpose: deliver a seamless listening interface for humans.

That model made sense when distribution was scarce and such interfaces were expensive to build. But we are no longer in that world.

Content creation is now exponential. Tools like Suno, Udio, SongKit, and modern DAWs can help create music at near-zero marginal cost. Interface creation is also instant. Agentic IDEs like Claude Code and Codex can scaffold, ship, and iterate on full products in hours. When both content and interfaces become cheap, the bottleneck shifts. The one-size-fits-all streaming platform stops being the center of gravity and what matters is not the app, but the dataset beneath it. In 2026, you can be in charge of your own music listening experience because you now have the tools to do so.

In a world of infinite music and infinite interfaces, durable leverage lives in the protocol: who can access the catalog, how rights are expressed, how value flows, and how systems compose.

Agents require:

• Machine readable rights and controls

• Composable metadata

• Internet-native financial rails

• Open, permissionless systems

The shift is not just from a Web 2.0 to a Web 3.0, but from a UI-first to an agent-first way of managing information. This requires a fundamentally different technology: a catalog that isn’t just consumable, but programmable by its design. A catalog where rights are encoded, access is deterministic, and commerce is composable. Agents require publicly verifiable data and authentic sources, not walled gardens that lack transparency.

The Open Audio Protocol

The Open Audio Protocol is the largest open, programmable music catalog in existence.

In a world where agents can churn out millions of niche music experiences for human and computer consumers, the backend that succeeds must be permissionless and community governed. Centralized APIs only introduce gatekeeping, monetization choke points, and arbitrary revocation whereas open protocols allow anyone to build, experiment, fork, remix, extend. And by being blockchain-native, governed by $AUDIO, ownership is transparent, payments are programmable, and smart contracts bind interactions to common rules.

The Open Audio Protocol provides novel consumption experiences that are simply not possible with traditional streaming infrastructure that is single-purpose by design.

The Vibecoded Future

If the Cursor creator can whip up an overnight Rollercoaster Tycoon clone (an incredible feat that famously took 2 years of raw assembly programming), spinning up a custom music interface is no longer a significant undertaking. As individuals consume a unique portfolio of music, the interfaces will follow suit.

One app might be an autonomous ambient radio station for late-night coders. Another might be a token-gated hyperpop fan club with dynamic remix rights. Another might be a genre agent that rewires itself based on your onchain identity.

None of these experiences need to replace each other. They will coexist and all need to draw from the same programmable catalog. The vibecoded future will not be owned by a single app, but instead be composed by thousands of builders and agents experimenting at the edges.

Music is the first great cultural dataset to become programmable at global scale and The Open Audio Protocol is that substrate. If you can imagine a music experience, you can now build it. The only constraint is the catalog you build on.

Music was once physical.

It became digital.

Then it became streamable.

Now it is programmable.

Start Building

1. Users of the protocol should be able to onboard easily into custodying some onchain asset

2. Assurance that onboarding is somewhat sibyl resistant (one person one account)

Solving for these two goals varies in difficulty depending on what kind of audience your product targets. High-intent user experiences have an easier time (e.g. crypto-banking, RWAs) where users plan to spend a lot, hold a lot, and each individual user can be worth high CAC to the onboarding protocol.

For example, to onramp $1,000 of crypto in a banking-like app, you would likely need to KYC your customers to check against OFAC, verify authenticity, etc. KYC flows typically cost north of $1/user and have a hefty UX tax: push a user to scan their driver’s license or enter their SSN into a webform for an application they’re new to. The KYC flow solves for (2) quite well (though forged passports are a real threat), and does enough for (1) because the user is willing to stomach 5 minutes of onboarding because of the size of their purchase/activity. They are high-intent.

Products in social, music, etc. typically have a lot of low-intent users, at least the top of the funnel. The user’s first experience to these kinds of products may be in an embedded mobile browser inside Instagram or it may be from a friend sharing a one off piece of UGC content in a text message. The user is passive and not necessarily likely to convert, even in the best of situations. For this kind of use case, your product does not have the luxury of 5 minutes of time for the user to enter their SSN. An in-the-trenches crypto native may say, “wait! they can just open your mobile website inside their Phantom browser!” and use their wallet (or something to that end). This naïvely assumes that the user already has a crypto wallet and that the user has already onramped in some capacity. This is a big assumption to make when your product is trying to reach normal adoption.

Solana Rent

Solana, though still the obvious choice for many consumer use cases due to its fast transaction speeds, full decentralization, and robust ecosystem, has an additional hurdle in the onramping problem: Rent.

The concept around Solana rent is simple: to store data onchain, you need to put up some collateral for it. While this is a bit of a simplification and the history is somewhat more complicated, rent boils down to putting down a one-time payment in order to write data. Everything onchain is stored in accounts on Solana and opening accounts requires a security deposit. When you close the account, you get your deposit back.

This materializes in a very painful way for onramp token custody. In order to hold any amount of a coin (no matter how small an amount), it costs ~0.002 SOL to open the account. At a low price of SOL, this is not a horrible fee to pay, but even at today’s depressed prices of $140/SOL, 0.002 is almost 30 cents! Put in the context of Artist Coins, in order to hold $1 USD of value of a coin, you pay a 30% tax! (Yes, not exactly “paid” because it can get returned, but it’s a major friction point.) Noted that most Artist Coin gated tracks only require 1 coin for access, so the rent fee can even outpace the value of the coin itself.

Building in music x crypto, we constantly dream of features and use-cases where artists can airdrop 1 coin of theirs to every fan who has attended a past show or purchased merchandise. That is functionally quite tricky to build with the cost of rent. The rent is just too damn high!

The Claimable Tokens (User Bank) Program

The cost of rent was an unacceptable onboarding experience of holding $AUDIO, so in 2022, under the Audius Protocol and now formally adopted in the Open Audio Protocol, a program was designed to pre-allocate Solana $AUDIO accounts for users. We called this program the Claimable Tokens (or User Bank) program and you can read more about it here.

The concept was to allow for applications on the protocol, like Audius, to be able to open token accounts for users, claimable only to an end-user and for the annoying rent fee to be covered by a fee payer of the application’s choosing. Another, more mundane aspect of the original design, was to solve for the fact that at the time all Audius users had Ethereum addresses which are not directly compatible with Solana and the Claimable Tokens program allowed for Ethereum identities to prove ownership over Solana accounts.

Since 2022, the Claimable Tokens program has grown to serve both USDC for in-app cash accounts on Audius as well as all Artist Coin holdings of users. In 2022, when Claimable Tokens launched, 0.002 SOL of rent was around 10 cents. This was a reasonable choice at the time for 1 $AUDIO account per user, but simply cannot scale to the magnitude of users across the Open Audio Protocol today and the variety of coins they may hold, many of which may have small dollar value (remember, a Spotify stream is worth around 0.3 cents).

We have recently shipped a simple, but very useful change to the Claimable Tokens program that allows for ownership to be transferred and accounts to be closed. This solves two major issues with the prior implementation for us.

1. Set Authority

Claimable Token accounts can now be moved from the Claimable Tokens program onto a user’s own Solana wallet as associated accounts. This supports a much cleaner experience for crypto-native users who bring wallets to the table already and also allows for balances to be more easily read by applications, explorers, CEXs, and DEXs. All funds belonging to a user can be more easily summed up with much simpler arithmetic.

2. Close Account

Claimable Token accounts can now be closed when their balance is zero and return rent to a predetermined owner when the account was created. This change massively reduces the amount of farming cost incurred by an application wishing to fee pay for their users as farmers/spammers typically churn and those zero’d out accounts can be now swept.

Very notably the native Solana Token Program account model does not support a way to have rent reclaimed by specified authority -- only the owner on the account. There are obvious denial-of-service concerns that are presented with the ability for acounts to be closed by a third-party, but as it stands today, it is prohibitively impossible to fee pay someone else’s token account rent using native solana tools as such a system can be infinitely drained of funds.

Imagine that you want to build an app where users can come in and earn revenue in USDC onto their Coinbase account. When the user signs up to earn, they have no earnings yet, but the application needs to create a USDC account on their Coinbase wallet, costing 0.002 SOL. If the application fee-pays the rent for that account creation, a nefarious user could simply close the account and collect the 0.002 SOL and repeat the process. The changes that give our Claimable Tokens program a flexible close account rent recipient, give the application slightly more control over user accounts, but can help prevent such fund draining scenarios from happening.

The changes to support these two functionalities can be seen in the code on Github, and thanks to our partners at Zellic, the program has been fully audited and upgraded.

Zellic Claimable Tokens and Rewards Program

This obviously doesn’t solve all of the problems we face with sibyl resistance and onboarding UX, but it is a meaningful step in the direction of creating better first onboarding experiences of anyone who is a first time crypto holder.

We welcome any bugs, feature asks and usages of our Claimable Tokens programs or any of the other utilities we have built along the way to bringing music onchain.

Subscribe now

When we began building Audius nearly seven years ago, our vision was to create an open, interoperable, and free-to-use global backend for music. We wanted to build a protocol that would stand the test of time and empower artists to own not just their music, but its distribution and their relationships with their fans, free from centralized gatekeepers. Since then, we’re incredibly proud to have turned that vision into reality, having served nearly 400 million streams across apps built on top of the music catalog.

We believe that the state of the Audius ecosystem is at a level of completeness that we can “coin” it the official 1.0 release (currently, it runs at 0.7). In fact, Artist Coins were the last missing piece of the puzzle proposed in the original 2020 Audius Whitepaper (whitepaper.audius.co, section 2.3), making the protocol feature complete. Of course, at that time, we could never have dreamed of how we could build it today. A lot has evolved in the creator and meme coin space over the years that makes a launch exactly like ours possible (Wallet UX, Solana, Meteora/Jupiter, Metaplex, RPC infra etc.), but this launch has always been part of the plan.

While we could not be more excited about the positioning of Audius in this next chapter, one thing stood out to us to address head on: our brand positioning.

Over the years, Audius has become much more commonly known as a music app, especially because our audience is primarily dominated by non-Web3-native artists and fans. Within the crypto space, the conventional wisdom at blockchain conferences is that Audius was a 2021 era music NFT play. And while it is true that we built some awesome integrations in the collectible space before anyone else did (NFT gated releases, NFT profile pictures, etc.), that was never the end goal. The technology behind Audius goes far beyond a single music app and has continued to grow in both usage and functionality year over year.

So, this marks not only the 1.0 release of the protocol, but the rebranding of the protocol stack as the Open Audio Protocol, along with a few brand new bells and whistles:

• A consolidation of the two node types (discovery node and content node) into one single validator node (reference implementation: github.com/openaudio/go-openaudio)

• More cost-effective blob storage streaming capability with higher & more resilient replication

• A stronger rewards system & framework for future work against Solana Artist Coins

• A fast BFT mechanism that keeps the storage network in sync

• Strong interoperability with the DDEX standard (the widely used music industry data format for releases, having partnered with Warner/Chappell Music, Kobalt, Distrokid, and many others)

• Block production and storage proofs to secure the network with automated slashing recommendations

and lots more.
(read on at docs.openaudio.org)

Why Rebrand the Protocol?

It’s a good question. There is prior art in both directions on this. Teams like Uniswap have launched new brands such as Unichain for their protocol initiatives, and Circle has done the same with Arc, their L1 chain. What differentiates Audius from many other crypto projects though is that our (app-side) user base is made up of people who do not read “Crypto Twitter” and may even be getting their first introduction to Web3 on our site. This naturally calls for a brand approach that bridges both worlds.

An effort like this runs risks of separating our audiences too far, but it also lets us tackle what is most important and directly in front of us: how do we continue to carve out the path for Audius to be known and loved as the app it is and for the protocol itself to attract new builders to create the Spotify/Tidal/Apple Music killers of 2025? And in fact, we would welcome anyone building a music client/DSP that outpaces Audius in growth, built on the Open Audio Protocol. Seriously, bring it. WAGMI.

Going forward, now that the community has officially adopted these changes (proposal 157), think about it this way:

Audius is the music app for the web3 world. Its feature set is robust for chat, social, and much more. It can be your home base as an artist to connect with new fans. Seriously, why would you keep using SoundCloud?

Imagine an internet where music looks more like Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision. The Open Audio Protocol is the global music database, open for all of us who reject the streaming status quo.

All of the above is powered by $AUDIO.

We hope you join us on this endeavor. This is the next chapter, not the finish line.

Learn More