Customers help build your business. Now they can own a piece of it. Every purchase builds equity.
How it works
Pick a governance structure. Equity handles the cooperative filing, the Management Agreement, and the entity setup. What used to require a specialized attorney and months of back-and-forth is done in an afternoon.
Members join with a name and phone number. Connect a POS and every transaction is tracked automatically. No manual entry, no new hardware. The ownership record builds from the first purchase.
Set the cadence and the split. Each cycle, Equity calculates every member's share of the surplus, distributes it, and generates the tax filings. One review, one approval.
Every member gets a dashboard with their spending, distributions, and equity stake. When they visit another business on Equity, that verified history travels with them.
Vote for the drink we feature June through August. Top pick gets brewed.
Same business, new structure
Equity forms a cooperative alongside an owner's existing LLC. Same POS, same bank account, same workflow. One Management Agreement. The cooperative owns the member relationships. The LLC operates on its behalf. Nothing else changes.
What members get
Joining takes thirty seconds. Members get real ownership with zero complexity on their end.
Each distribution cycle, members receive a payout proportional to how much they spent. The business sets the split between cash and equity. Store credit, direct deposit, or a combination. Tax-deductible for the business under Subchapter T.
A portion of each distribution stays in the business as equity in the member's name. Redeemable through rolling redemptions or when the business sells. Real ownership, not points.
Members can hold ratification rights over structural decisions. The scope depends on the governance model. Polls let owners ask for input without giving up authority.
Verified patronage history, portable across every business on Equity. Years of loyalty become a financial identity that follows them wherever they go.
The platform
Entity formation. Patronage tracking. Surplus distribution. Tax compliance. Governance. The legal and financial complexity that used to require attorneys and accountants runs automatically. A business owner plugs in and never touches a spreadsheet.
Bylaws are bound to platform settings at the code level. If a provision requires a 67% supermajority to change the distribution method, no one can bypass that. The platform enforces the process the members agreed to.
Subchapter T patronage calculations, 1099-PATR generation, filing threshold monitoring, use-type exemption tracking. The tax work that used to require a specialized accountant runs automatically every cycle.
Every audit event, governance vote, and credential issuance is hashed into a Merkle tree and anchored on-chain. Tamper-evident by default. The entire record can be independently verified without trusting the platform.
The credential
Every member receives a permanent, portable, cryptographically signed record of what they built. Anchored to a blockchain no single entity controls. It travels across every business in the network and accumulates for as long as they keep showing up.
Issued as a W3C Verifiable Credential signed with the business's DID key. Cryptographic proof of financial history, verified by anyone, without trusting the platform.
The member controls it. It works at every business on Equity and follows them wherever they go. Years of contribution become a financial identity that compounds.
Every membership, distribution, and equity allocation is hashed into a Merkle tree and anchored on-chain. Tamper-evident by default. The record exists for as long as the blockchain does.
Adam Weber
Equity
“The customer who helped build this place now owns a piece of it.”
The network
Contribution history issued by one business is a record. The same credential recognized across ten thousand businesses becomes something more. It grows with the member and means something everywhere they go.
Walk into a new business on Equity and your verified patronage history is already there. No new sign-up, no starting from zero. Your contribution follows you and compounds across every business you visit.
See who a member is before they spend a dollar. Someone who spent $10,000 a year at a similar business for three years shows up as a known quantity on day one.
A community lender can see years of consistent economic participation that a credit score was never designed to capture. The people who show up every day finally have a record that proves it.
Common questions
A business doing $500k in revenue at 7% margin has about $35k in surplus. If members represent 60% of revenue, roughly $21k is attributable to them. The platform requires at least 20% of that to go out as cash (about $4,200 in this example), but the owner can set it higher. The rest stays in the business as retained equity in members’ names. Patronage distributions are tax-deductible under Subchapter T, so at a 25% effective rate the after-tax cost of that cash portion is closer to $3,150. Members who hold a genuine stake churn less, refer more, and come back faster after disruptions.
Not on demand. Retained equity is a named capital account on the cooperative’s books. Real ownership, but not liquid. Members access it through rolling redemptions (the board redeems the oldest allocations over time, converting equity back to cash), or when the business is sold. Closer to a forced savings account attached to a business someone already patronizes than a stock on the open market. Equity shows members exactly what it is upfront.
No. The LLC keeps operating exactly as it does today. Same bank account, same vendors, same payroll. Equity forms a cooperative alongside it and signs a Management Agreement that designates the LLC as the cooperative’s operating agent. Customer transactions are legally conducted on behalf of the cooperative, which is what makes patronage distributions tax-deductible under Subchapter T. One document. Everything else is handled by the platform.
Only in structures that include governance. Some give members ratification rights over a narrow set of structural actions. Others are purely financial. Formal voting authority never extends to daily operations like hours, pricing, or staffing. Polls are separate. Owners can ask members for input on anything, anytime, without giving up decision-making authority.
No. Distributions come from net margins. Not from capital, not from reserves, not from borrowed funds. If there’s no surplus from member transactions, there’s nothing to distribute.
Members who’ve been accumulating equity alongside the business hold a genuine claim on sale proceeds. For many owners, that’s the most valuable part of the model. A member base that could be the natural buyers when the time comes. The governance structure determines whether members have formal approval rights over a sale.
Integration takes an afternoon with a supported POS. After that, distributions run automatically on whatever cadence the business sets. Most businesses spend less than two hours per quarter.
Equity helps with that during setup. The right structure depends on what the business wants to share, how much governance members should have, and how the owner thinks about succession. Some owners want full member ownership. Others want a simple cash-distribution layer.
The financial system has always known people by what they owe. Equity is building the first system that knows them by what they gave.
Early access
Starting with a small group of businesses and members who want to shape what this becomes.
A short conversation about your business. No pitch, no demo loop. We want to understand what you need before we talk about what we built.
First cohort onboards Fall 2026. Entity formation, POS integration, and first distribution cycle within 30 days of start.
Free for early cohort members. No platform fees until you run your first distribution.
A real conversation, not a sales funnel.