Settlement

The toll never holds your money. When an agent pays to read an article, the fee goes from the agent's wallet to the author's wallet on-chain. No account in the middle fills up and pays out, ours or yours.

What actually moves

An agent that wants a gated article gets a 402 with a quote: the amount, and the wallets to pay (the ones your credits API named). The agent signs a payment for that quote. It settles as USDC on the chain set per site under Sites → Manage → Payouts → Settlement network, split by weight, with each author's share landing in their own address. The first is paid inside the read; the rest follow within a minute (see shares that settle a moment later).

An operator fee is its own transfer from the agent to the operator, a separate line in the same quote. It is never taken from an author's cut. Every party is paid by the buyer directly.

A worked example

Say you price an article at $0.02 and your credits API names two authors, weighted 3 and 1.

An agent asks for the article and gets a 402 quote listing the wallets and the amounts. It signs once. What lands on-chain:

leg	destination	amount
primary author	0xA11C… (weight 3)	$0.015
co-author	0xB0B0… (weight 1)	$0.005

Two transfers, both from the agent's wallet, signed in one payment. The first settles as the article is served and the second within a minute. The authors' total is exactly the $0.02 you set. Neither share passes through the other author's address or through ours.

If you also run a citation multiplier, it scales the price before the split: the same article cited rather than read is quoted at the multiplied price, and the two legs above scale with it.

An agent paying with a stock x402 client, one that does not understand multi-leg quotes, signs only the first leg. That agent is served the article and the primary author is paid in full. The co-author's share is recorded as unpaid and shows on the author's earnings page as money the buyer never authorized. See For authors.

How naulon charges

Rates and plan prices are on the pricing page. This section covers the mechanism.

The operator fee is a percentage of the toll price, sent as the separate buyer-to-operator transfer described above. It is added to what the agent pays; the author leg is the full price you set. If no agent pays, there is no fee.

Paid plans buy more sites, more seats, longer history, and at the top the compliance features. Two rules apply:

• Studio is free until the toll has paid you. Once agents have paid your sites past a threshold, it bills every period until you cancel. Before that it costs nothing and your plan stays as it is. A site earning a few dollars should not get a monthly bill larger than naulon has earned it. Enterprise is quoted per deal and billed at the agreed price and term from the start, because it is bought for the compliance features, often by accounts with little traffic.
• Every plan is available at any time. The threshold decides when a plan starts costing money, never what you are allowed to have.

Your billing page shows what the toll has paid you so far and whether your plan is billing, beside your invoice history.

Why it's built this way

Taking a buyer's payment, holding it, and forwarding shares later would make naulon a money transmitter. Instead the toll computes who is owed what and the buyer pays them directly, so naulon is never in the flow of funds.

For you this means:

• Readers pay you, not us. Your wallet is the destination in the transaction the agent signs. There's no payout schedule and no balance we could lose or freeze.
• You can check it. Every settlement is an on-chain transaction to the wallets you published. The fee, the split and the destination are all verifiable without trusting our ledger.

Receipts and re-reads

After a successful payment the toll serves the article and returns a short-lived license to the agent. While it's valid, the same agent can re-read the same article free. When it expires, the next read pays again.

How settlements reach the chain

Every payment settles through Circle Gateway's batched rail, on every network we support. The buyer signs a payment authorization off-chain, with no gas, and we pass it to Circle. You are credited immediately in your own Gateway balance at Circle, and the article is served in the same request. Circle then writes many authorizations to the chain in a single transaction and pays its gas.

That Gateway balance is yours: only the wallet it was paid to can withdraw it, and neither naulon nor anyone else can move it. Withdraw from your wallet page, or from /earnings by connecting the wallet you were paid to.

Neither you nor the buyer pays a per-transaction network fee. Settled one at a time, a payment has to be worth about a cent before the network fee stops eating it; batching takes the floor down to a millionth of a dollar, so a tenth of a cent is a workable price.

Your settlement appears on-chain as part of a batch, not as its own transaction. The amount, address and buyer are unchanged, and each toll still records its own reference you can look up.

Shares that settle a moment later

A read with one payee settles inside the request. A read with more than one, such as an article with co-authors, settles the first payee inside the request, because that payment is what serves the page. The buyer signs every other share in the same payment, and those settle in a background sweep that runs every minute. Until then the dashboard shows them as pending.

The sweep is called the drain. It retries a share that failed to land, and never settles one twice. A buyer's signature is valid for a limited window, so a share still unsettled when that window closes is dropped rather than charged late.

What you see

Earnings show up as transactions to your authors' wallets. The operator's view totals settled fees per site for support and reconciliation from recorded events; no money sits there. The chain is the record, and the dashboard reads it back.