For authors

Someone invited you to claim your articles on a site that runs naulon. This page covers what you're claiming, where the money goes, and how to check that it arrived. The rest of these docs are written for the person who runs the site.

What you're being paid for

The site you write for charges automated readers. People read your article free. When an AI agent reads it to answer a question, or cites it to ground an answer, it pays a small fee first, and the site's credits say how that fee splits between the people who wrote it.

Your share goes straight from the buyer's wallet to yours. Neither the site nor naulon holds it or pays it out later. So the one thing you have to do is set your wallet.

Accepting the invitation

The invite email carries a single link. Open it and you'll see which site invited you and as what.

• If you've never signed in, set your password on the accept page.
• If you already have an account, sign in with the invited email address and open the link again. An invitation is tied to the address it was sent to; signed in as anyone else, you'll see that the invitation isn't found.

Nothing is granted until you accept, and declining costs you nothing.

You can contribute to more than one site. Each one is a separate invitation and gets its own card everywhere below.

Setting where you get paid

Open Payouts. Each site you've accepted has a card showing whether the site's credits point at you, and the wallet your share lands in.

Two ways to set the wallet:

• Create one here. A passkey wallet, made in your browser with the face or fingerprint unlock you already use. Nothing to install, no seed phrase. Use this if you don't already hold USDC somewhere.
• Use a wallet you already have. Connect it and sign a message to prove it's yours, or paste the address. A pasted address is checked for a valid checksum.

Your site owner doesn't need your address. Their credits can name you and leave the address blank; we fill it from the one you set here. You set it once per site, and you can give every site the same address.

The address must be able to receive USDC on the network the site settles on, which the payout screen names. A wallet you control works on any of them, because the same address is yours on every EVM network. An exchange deposit address may not: it is issued for one network, and USDC that arrives on another is lost.

This matters most on Arc, Circle's payments network, which many sites settle on. Kraken and KuCoin accept USDC deposits on Arc, so an Arc deposit address from either works as a payout address. For other exchanges, use a wallet you control. To move the earnings to such an exchange later, bridge them: Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol burns the USDC on Arc and mints it on a network your exchange accepts. The Arc side costs well under a cent in USDC; the destination network charges its own fee to mint. You bridge when you cash out, not per payment.

We store an address, never a key, plus the signed proof if you connected a wallet. Neither we nor the site owner can move your money.

You can change the wallet later from the same page. The change applies to tolls paid after it.

"Your author id", and why the card might warn you

The site's credits name each contributor by a stable id, and your share routes by that id. Your wallet only receives money if the id on your card is the one the site's credits use. The card shows which situation you're in, before and after you set a wallet.

What the card says	What it means	What to do
You're set to receive your share	Your wallet is registered and the site's credits list your id as a payable contributor.	Nothing. Your cut routes automatically.
Your author id is recognised	The credits list you, but you haven't set a wallet.	Set a wallet. Until you do, your share has nowhere to go.
Registered, but not yet linked	Your wallet is saved, but the site's credits don't carry this id, so nothing routes to you.	Nothing on your side; it's flagged for the site owner. The id is on the card, copy-ready, if they ask for it. It has to match theirs exactly; a WordPress site, for instance, names its authors wp-user-<number>.
Confirm with your site owner	The site serves its credits from its own API, so we can't read them to check.	Set your wallet, then ask the owner to confirm their credits use this exact author id.

The last one isn't a fault: the site generates credits from its own database, so the check happens at their end. They need to match the id on your card in the authorId field described in the credits API.

Seeing what you've earned

Articles lists every article that credits you, per site, with your share of each. If a site serves credits from its own API, we can't list its articles, but your share still routes.

Earnings leads with what your work has earned. Under it are four states that add up to that number:

• Settled. Paid, and waiting in your own Circle Gateway balance until you withdraw it (see below).
• Pending. Still settling. Some shares are paid as a second transfer shortly after the read, so a recent citation can sit here briefly.
• Expired. The buyer's authorization ran out before that transfer went through, so it will never be paid.
• Unpaid. The buyer never authorized your share at all. An agent paying with a basic x402 client signs only the first payee in the quote, so on an article with co-authors the others can be left out. The read is still recorded against your work; the money for your share was never sent.

A figure under Expired or Unpaid is not a delay; that money will not come.

These figures are what the toll recorded, not a balance naulon holds.

Withdrawing your earnings

Readers pay through Circle Gateway, which settles many small payments together. Your share lands in your own Gateway balance on the network the reader paid on, not directly in your wallet. Only your wallet can withdraw it.

Withdraw from Payout (signed in) or from /earnings, which needs no account: connect the wallet you were paid to and it shows what is waiting, per network.

A wallet you control (MetaMask and the like). You sign once. Circle sends the money to that same wallet on the network you pick and covers the gas, taking its fee from the balance. The panel shows Circle's live fee and exactly what arrives before you sign; as measured in October 2026 the fee is about $0.02 to $0.06 depending on the networks. Withdrawals start at $1.00, because below that the fee is most of the money. The page shows it as arrived once Circle reports the transfer finalized.

A passkey wallet set up here. Gateway does not accept a passkey's signature, so these use Gateway's own exit instead: start a withdrawal, wait Gateway's delay (about 7 days on Base and on Arc), then finish it. Both steps are free. Passkey withdrawals start at $5.00. Don't start a second withdrawal on a network while one is waiting: it adds to the first and restarts the 7-day timer, which is why the page only offers "start" when nothing is pending there.

Money still settling shows separately and becomes withdrawable once Circle's batch lands.

Proving it: receipts

Receipts has one line per paid citation: the article, the amount, the time, and the settlement reference. Where the reference is a transaction, you can open it in a block explorer and check it yourself.

Each line carries a state:

State	Meaning
Paid	Settled. The reference is the settlement.
Settling	A second transfer that hasn't gone through yet, still inside its window.
Not paid	That window closed unpaid. This one will not arrive.
Recorded	We couldn't tie the line to exactly one transaction with confidence, so we don't name one. The citation and the amount are still recorded.

Not every reference is a transaction hash. Some are a payment-provider transfer id: real money, but not something a block explorer can show. If the site is in test mode, the line says it is not a real payment. Only a transaction hash gets an explorer link, and the server decides which is which, so every screen and the CSV agree.

Export CSV downloads the same lines. It is free on every plan.

What a receipt does and doesn't prove

A receipt shows that a payment of a stated amount reached your wallet, on a stated chain, in a stated transaction, recorded against a citation of a specific article at a specific time.

It does not show that a model used your work, how, or whether it shaped any answer a person read. Nobody can show that.

Your account

Security is where you turn on two-factor authentication for your own sign-in. If the site's owner requires it for everyone on their team, you'll be sent here to enrol before you can go further.

These limits are enforced:

• Neither the site owner nor another author can change your payout wallet.
• You see your own share of each citation. Site totals and other contributors' amounts and wallets never reach you.
• If the site's owner is being helped by support with access to their account, that access is read-only and cannot see your payout page.

Common questions

I set my wallet but earnings are zero. Check the card on Payouts. "Registered, but not yet linked" means the site's credits don't carry your id yet, so no toll has ever routed to you. If it says you're set to receive, then nothing has been cited yet, and earnings appear as agents start paying.

Can I use a different wallet per site? Yes. Each site's card is its own registration.

Do I need to hold anything to get paid? No. Payment arrives at your address; you don't need a balance, and you don't pay gas to receive.

What happens if I never set a wallet? Your share does not accumulate for you. Most sites send it to the site's own wallet: that setting is on by default for new sites. If the site has turned it off, your share goes to the article's other authors, and if you wrote it alone, that read is free. Set a wallet and your share is paid to you instead, whatever the site has set.

Can I stop my work being sold this way? That's the site owner's setting. Ask them to mark the article free.

Proving you were paid, to someone who doesn't trust us

Every paid read mints a signed document naming the resource, the amount, and the wallet that received it. The signing key is published at a well-known URL, so anyone can check the signature without an account and without asking us.

Paste one at naulon.app/verify. The check runs in your browser and nothing you paste is sent anywhere, so you can show a publisher, an accountant or a court that the money moved without relying on our database.

A licence that has expired still proves the payment happened. Expiry ends the right to re-read the article; it does not un-sign the document.

The page also checks the buyer's own signature on the payment and asks Circle, which settled it, whether the transfer to your wallet went through. That part does not depend on anything naulon signed.

Usually you send a link instead. Each row on your receipts page links to its record, naulon.app/verify?host=<your site>&jti=<id>. Whoever opens it gets the record from the gate that signed it, checked in their own browser. An agent that cited you is told to print the same link beside the citation.