Apologies for the delay in response time, this issue brought up in the forum topic became a company wide discussion and talking point in identifying how this issue came about in the first place and what we can do to better remedy the situation.
First off, I want to apologize for misspeaking about the functionality of the Ink system in my previous response. When I spoke about each individual Ink being meta tagged with a source and origin, I was unaware that this functionality was not implemented and was a long term plan for the Ink system. I was made aware of this mischaracterization of our current system. I apologize for the confusion that this has caused.
The Tapas Ink system (previously Coins) was originally designed for the Premium Program which creators can utilize to place episodes under a paywall and debuted in 2016. We designed various different tiers of Ink packs and implemented what we internally refer to as an exchange rate. This operates independently of the fees associated with the Tapas app and Tapas web.
When a person buys Ink they are exchanging a cash amount for a digital currency. This is the first instance of the exchange rate taking effect. At $1.99 for 1,600 Ink, the exchange rate is roughly (rounding) $1:800 Ink, all the way to the highest tier, $49.99 for 60,000 Ink which is roughly (rounding) is $1:1200 Ink. When that person decides to spend the Ink, a second exchange rate is applied when in transit to the creator, however the second exchange rate is not dynamic and is fixed at the highest tier of $1:1200, which explains the discrepancy outlined in this topic.
Because the aforementioned full functionality of Ink wasn’t implemented we are unable to apply a dynamic second exchange rate to match the first exchange rate.
To clarify this process, we’ll be adding additional language on the creator dashboard and help center to outline what the exchange rates are (this is due to ship soon).
I apologize for the delay in response, I was filing the issue while exploring the root cause and trying to propose a variety of solutions to help.