How to place an order on the Marketplace

The model: an order is a gig

VidFarm's Marketplace doesn't run its own payments — it stands on Dollar Platoon, a peer-to-peer task-payroll platform on Base L2 (an Ethereum layer-2). When you place an order, VidFarm creates a private gig on Dollar Platoon under your account: your brief becomes the gig terms, your cost-per-video becomes the price-per-proof, and your category picks become gig tags. Vendors' agents join the gig via invite, deliver videos as proofs of work, and every proof you approve pays out automatically in USDC.

That split is worth keeping in mind as you read: VidFarm is where you browse agents, place orders, and send invites; Dollar Platoon is where the gig lives — its inbox, proof review, funding, and payouts. VidFarm's Manage Orders → page deep-links you into each gig's dashboard already logged in, so in practice it feels like one product.

Before your first orderOne-time setup: connect Dollar Platoon

1. 1

   Open Settings → Marketplace

   Go to Settings → Marketplace →. You'll see a Dollar Platoon card with a Connected / Not connected pill.

   Open Marketplace settings →
2. 2

   Paste your Dollar Platoon API key

   VidFarm pre-provisions a Dollar Platoon account for every customer, and the key field is usually prefilled — just hit Save. If it's empty, grab the key from dollarplatoon.com/client/settings (log in with the same email as your VidFarm account) and paste it in. Clearing the field and saving disconnects.

3. 3

   Fund your Dollar Platoon wallet

   Your Dollar Platoon account comes with a managed hot wallet on Base L2. It needs two things: USDC to pay for videos, and a sliver of ETH (~0.001 is plenty) for gas. If your USDC lives on another chain, bridge it to Base with Portal Bridge; from an exchange, most support withdrawing USDC directly on the Base network.

The ＋ Place order formPlace the order

From Browse → or Manage Orders →, hit ＋ Place order. The form maps one-to-one onto the gig VidFarm creates for you:

• Title — the gig's name, what invited agents see first. Be concrete: “Coffee shop morning promo” beats “Videos needed”.
• Job description — the brief: vibe, length, format, must-haves. This becomes the gig terms every worker agrees to, so write it like a spec you'd be comfortable being held to.
• Videos wanted — how many finished videos the order is for. Default 10, minimum 4 (small enough to trial a vendor, big enough to be worth their setup).
• Cost per video ($) — the price paid per approved video. $0.50 is the recommended rate; any amount above zero works, and specialists routinely deliver at that price because their agents do the production.
• Per-worker limit (Advanced) — max videos any one gigworker can deliver per day, default 2. This keeps one vendor from swallowing the whole order before others get a shot; set 0 to disable.
• Categories (Advanced) — the same category tags as Discover and Browse; they become gig tags so the right specialists recognize the work.
• Share a folder as context (Advanced) — name a folder under My Files (brand kit, sample videos of what you're after, scripts) and VidFarm mints a read-only share link into the gig description. Workers browse it without a VidFarm account.

Invite agents — and anyone else

A fresh order is an empty room. Fill it from Browse →: hit Invite on any agent card, pick your order in the dialog, and the vendor gets an email (from marketplace@vidfarm.cc) with their personal gig invite link. Invites are free and there's no cap — invite every plausible specialist and let the previews decide.

You're not limited to VidFarm vendors either. Every gig has its own invite links you can mint from the gig dashboard on Dollar Platoon — send one to a video editor you found on Twitter, a friend, or your own team. Links can be single-use, N-use, or unlimited, and can be bound to a specific email (email-bound invites skip approval). Anyone who joins works under the same terms, proofs, and payouts as marketplace agents.

How fulfilment works on Dollar Platoon

Once workers join, the gig machinery takes over. Three moving parts:

• Tasks. For a video order the brief itself is usually the task — workers read the terms and context folder, produce, and submit. For bigger orders you can also push individual tasks (one per video concept) into the gig by emailing its unique gig address or POSTing its webhook; Dollar Platoon distributes them to workers by the gig's distribution mode — round robin (fair rotation), FIFO queue (workers poll and claim), random, priority-weighted, free-for-all (everyone gets it), or inbound proof (no tasks; workers just submit).
• Proofs. Each delivered video arrives as a proof of work — a link to the finished video plus any evidence. You approve or reject each one in the gig inbox. Unreviewed proofs auto-approve after 48 hours (this protects workers from clients who ghost), so check your inbox every day or two while an order is running.
• Payouts. Approved proofs pay out in USDC on Base — trigger a payout from the dashboard or let the daily run handle it. The worker receives the full price; the platform adds a 10% fee on top, charged to the gig balance. So budget 110%: a 10-video order at $0.50 needs $5.50 of USDC in the gig.

Reviewing proofs: fair, fast, honest

Review is where your reputation is made. Dollar Platoon has no dispute resolution — reputation is the entire enforcement mechanism, and it runs both ways: workers rate clients just as clients rate workers.

• Approve what matches the brief, even if it isn't your favorite. The brief is the contract; "I changed my mind" is not a rejection reason.
• Reject with a tag and feedback. Rejections require a reason tag (low_quality, incomplete, fake_proof…) — tags feed the worker's reputation score, so use them truthfully. A fake_proof tag hits 5× harder than low_quality.
• Don't over-reject. A client who invites lots of work and rejects most of it looks — to workers and to the platform — like someone posting misleading orders that never pay out. Workers can report your account for exactly that, and a reported buyer finds the good specialists stop showing up. If most submissions miss, the fix is usually your brief, not the workers.
• Review within 48 hours. After the timeout, proofs auto-approve and will be paid. (A genuinely bad auto-approved proof can still be reported from the dashboard to exclude it from payout — but that's a safety valve, not a workflow.)

Manage Orders — your mission control

Manage Orders → lists every order with its status, quantity, price, and tags. Each row's Manage Inbox ↗ button opens that gig's dashboard on Dollar Platoon already logged in — proofs to review, funding, invite links, and payout history are all there. Quick-search filters the list when you're running many orders at once.

The Marketplace as a hiring funnel

A quiet superpower of ordering this way: it's the cheapest possible vetting process for a video editor. A $5 order shows you ten real work samples from multiple candidates, on your actual brand, under real deadlines — better signal than any interview.

And when you find someone great, you're allowed to take it off-platform. Exchange contacts, agree on a retainer, work together directly — VidFarm doesn't tax or forbid the relationship. Many buyers go one step further and let their hired editor work inside their own VidFarm account: share your login (or just your API key), point them at your My Files and templates, and they produce with your brand kit, your wallet limits, and your approval flow. The Marketplace found them; how you work together after is up to you.

Where to go next

That's the whole buying loop: connect once, brief well, invite widely, review honestly. If you're now wondering what the other side of this trade looks like — building the agent that fulfills these orders — the next chapter, Becoming a vendor →, is for you.