For authors

Someone invited you to claim your articles on a site that runs naulon. This page is what happens next: what you're claiming, where the money goes, and how to check that it arrived.

Everything else in these docs is written for the person who runs the site. This one is for you, the person who wrote the thing.

What you're being paid for

The site you write for charges automated readers. A person reading your article pays nothing and always will. 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. It does not sit in the site's account and it does not sit in ours. Nobody holds it on your behalf and nobody pays it out to you later, because there is nothing to pay out. That is why setting your wallet is the one thing you have to do.

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, the accept page sets your password inline. There is no code to copy out of the email and no second visit to your inbox.
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; signing in as someone else will tell you the invitation isn't found rather than silently attaching it to the wrong account.

Nothing is granted until you accept. Declining is a real answer and 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. There's one card per site you've accepted, and each card has two parts: whether the site's credits actually point at you, and the wallet your share should land in.

Two ways to set the wallet:

Create one here. A passkey-backed wallet, made in your browser with the same face or fingerprint unlock you already use. Nothing to install, no seed phrase to keep safe. This is the recommended path 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. Pasting is checked for a valid checksum, because one wrong character in an address is money sent nowhere.

Your site owner does not have to know your address, and usually shouldn't. Their credits can name you and leave the address blank; we fill it from the one you set here. You do this once per site, since each site invites you separately and each keeps its own card, but nothing stops you giving every one of them the same address.

Whichever you choose, the address has to 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 is not: those are issued for one network, and USDC that arrives on a different one is gone.

That second point is worth a sentence more than it used to be. Sites increasingly settle on Arc, Circle's own payments network, and no exchange takes deposits on Arc yet, so an exchange address is not a payout address for one of those sites, and a wallet you control is the only workable answer. Getting the earnings to an exchange afterwards is a bridge: your USDC is burned on Arc and minted on a network your exchange does accept, through Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol. Arc prices its own side of that in USDC and a transaction there costs well under a cent; what the destination network charges to mint is its own. It is a step you take when you want to cash out, not something that has to happen per payment.

Either way, what gets stored is an address and a proof that you control it, never a key. We cannot move your money, and neither can the site owner.

You can change the wallet later from the same page. The change takes effect for tolls paid after it, not retroactively.

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

The site's credits name each contributor by a stable id. Your share routes by that id, so your payout wallet only matters if the id on your card is the one the site's credits actually use. The card tells you which of three situations you're in, and it tells you before you've set a wallet as well as after.

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. Plenty of sites generate credits from their own database rather than storing them with us; it just means the check has to happen at their end. The id on your card is what they need to match: 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, the list can't be shown. Your share still routes; we just can't enumerate the articles from here.

Earnings is the money view. One number leads: what your work has earned. Under it, three states that always add back up to that number:

Settled. In your wallet. Done.
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.

Expired is shown separately on purpose. It used to be counted inside "settled", which told authors that money they were never going to receive had already arrived. If you see a number here, it isn't a delay; it's a payment that failed for good.

These figures are what the toll recorded, not a balance we hold for you. There is no withdraw button anywhere in this product, because there is nothing to withdraw from.

Proving it: receipts

Receipts is one line per paid citation: which article, how much, when, and the settlement reference behind it. Because the money moves buyer → you, there is a real transaction to point at, and where one exists you can open it in a block explorer and check it yourself. You do not have to take our word for any of it.

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, real record, but not something a block explorer can show you. And if the site is running in test mode, the line says so plainly: it is not a real payment. Only a genuine transaction hash gets an explorer link, and that distinction is decided on the server so every screen and the CSV agree.

Export CSV downloads the same lines for your own records. It is not a paid feature and never will be. Proof that you were paid isn't an upsell.

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 it used it, or whether it shaped any answer a person eventually read. Nobody can show you that, and a receipt that implied it would be worth less than one that doesn't.

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.

A few boundaries worth knowing, because they're enforced rather than promised:

The site owner cannot change your payout wallet, and no other author can either. That row is yours.
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 stops at your payout page; an impersonated session gets nothing back from it.

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 doesn't accumulate somewhere waiting for you, and what happens instead depends on who else is on the article. If you wrote it alone, nothing is charged and that read is free. If it credits other authors who can be paid, your share is split among them: the page is still charged in full, and the money goes to your co-authors rather than to you. A site owner can also turn on a setting that sends unclaimed shares to their own wallet instead; it is off unless they chose it. Setting a wallet is what makes the share yours.

Can I stop my work being sold this way? That's the site owner's setting, not ours to change from here. Talk to them; they can mark an article free, and a free article is never charged for.

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. It is signed with a key published at a well-known URL, so anyone can check it without an account and without asking us. The check is a signature check, not a lookup in our database.

Paste one at naulon.app/verify. The page runs the check in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere. That matters for the case where it counts: you are showing a publisher, an accountant or a court that the money moved, and "their own system says so" is not evidence. The signature is.

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.

You rarely need to paste anything. Each row on your receipts page links straight to its record, naulon.app/verify?host=<your site>&jti=<id>, and that link is the thing to send. Whoever opens it gets the record fetched from the gate that signed it and checked in their own browser. The same link is what an agent that cited you is told to print beside the citation, so a reader of that answer can land on the same page.