# About GHAN

> GHAN is built by Daniel Matalon. It exists because desktop software has no distribution layer and the last people who tried to build one destroyed the category — so the interesting problem is not the marketplace, it is the referee.

Source: https://ghan.io/about/  
Published: 2026-09-22 · Updated: 2026-09-22  
Publisher: GHAN — the audited cross-promotion network for desktop apps (https://ghan.io)

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## Why a referee and not a marketplace

The idea that desktop apps should promote each other is obvious and old. It has been tried repeatedly and it has failed repeatedly, and it never failed because the matching was bad. It failed because nobody could tell whether the installs were real, so the cheapest way to earn was always to manufacture them, and the networks that tolerated that out-competed the ones that did not until antivirus vendors ended the argument for everybody.

So GHAN's product is not the matching. It is the proof.

- A unit of account that is expensive to fake: two independent signatures plus 48 hours of survival.
- A ledger neither party can edit, where both parties signed every line.
- A gate that is automated, public and re-run weekly.
- Published rejection numbers, because a network with no fraud report is a network you cannot evaluate.

## The seven principles

1. **Deterministic attribution only.** Signed, single-use, expiring tokens. No fingerprinting or probabilistic matching, ever.
2. **Payout clears on behaviour, not events.** An install is not money. 48-hour retention clears standard installs; day-7 engagement clears anything above EUR 500 per day per pair.
3. **Cost-to-fake exceeds payout** on every monetised event. A feature that breaks this inequality does not get built.
4. **Templated creatives only.** Icon, name, one generated line, rendered by GHAN's SDK. No custom banners, no partner HTML.
5. **Two human moments, never zero.** The partner ships the release containing the SDK in their own signed build, and the partner authorises money. Everything else is agent to agent.
6. **MCP-first.** Every write capability ships in the MCP server before, or instead of, the dashboard. The dashboard is a read-only mirror plus billing.
7. **Transparency structural, not promised.** One ledger, both parties signed, machine-readable statements over MCP.

These have already cost the product features. Installer-time placements, custom creative, probabilistic attribution and direct app-to-app targeting were all removed by principle 3 alone.

## What GHAN has deliberately not built

- No mobile. Not now, not later.
- No pure auction, and no enterprise tier. The rate card is a published floor that never rises; bidding above it buys priority, never access.
- No custom creative surface.
- No installer-time placement.
- No native Swift or C# SDK yet — version 1 is Electron, Tauri and Node, and the roadmap says so rather than implying otherwise.

## The person

GHAN is built by **Daniel Matalon**. Public profile: [linkedin.com/in/dmatalon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmatalon/). Reach the project at `hello@ghan.io` or through the [contact page](/contact/).

A network selling auditability with an anonymous team would be its own counterexample.

## Questions people ask about this

### Who is behind GHAN?

GHAN is built by Daniel Matalon, who also builds Boom and Recepte. Contact is hello@ghan.io and the founder's public profile is linked from this page. There is no anonymous team behind a brand name, which matters for a network whose entire pitch is auditability.

### Why build this now?

Because two things changed at once. Desktop software is being written again at volume, largely in Electron and Tauri by very small teams, and those teams now have coding agents that can integrate an SDK, read a score and operate a campaign without a human. A network that is MCP-first can onboard a partner in an afternoon instead of a quarter, and that is the only way a fixed-rate network with a strict gate reaches enough members to be useful.

### What are GHAN's non-negotiable principles?

Seven, written down and treated as constraints rather than aspirations. Deterministic attribution only. Payout clears on behaviour, not events. Cost to fake must exceed the payout on every monetised event. Templated creatives only. Two human moments, never zero. MCP-first for every write capability. Transparency that is structural rather than promised.

### Is GHAN funded?

GHAN is self-funded and in its founding-partner phase. There are no investor-driven growth targets pushing against the gate, which is relevant because every previous network in this category loosened its standards under exactly that pressure.