Settlement
This is the part people worry about, so it's worth being plain: 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, directly, on-chain. There is no account in the middle that fills up and pays out. Not the operator's, not 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 your site's settlement
network, set per site under Sites → Manage → Advanced → Settlement network,
which names the chain that site is on. It is split by weight, each author's share landing
in their own address in the same settlement.
If there's an operator fee, it rides along as its own transfer from the agent to the operator, a separate line in the same quote. It is never skimmed from an author's cut, because there is no pooled cut to skim from. Every party is paid by the buyer, in parallel.
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, both in the same settlement. The author total is exactly the $0.02 you set. The split divides your price; it never adds to it. Neither author's share passes through the other'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 rather than silently lost, and shows on the author's earnings page as money the buyer never authorized. See For authors.
How naulon charges
The mechanism, not the numbers. Rates and plan prices live on the pricing page, which is the one place that states them.
The operator fee is a percentage of the toll price, attached as the separate buyer-to-operator transfer described above. It is added to what the agent pays, not subtracted from what you receive; the author leg is the full price you set either way. If no agent pays, there is no fee, because there is nothing to attach it to.
Paid plans also exist, and they buy depth: more sites, more seats, longer history, and above that the compliance surfaces. Two things about them belong here, because they are behaviour rather than price:
- The mid tier is free until the toll has paid you. Once agents have paid your sites past a threshold, it starts billing every period until you cancel. Before that it costs nothing, and your plan stays exactly as it is: no lapse, no downgrade, nothing to reinstate. The reason is arithmetic: a site earning a few dollars should not be handed a monthly bill larger than the product has ever earned it. This is the tier a publisher takes themselves, so it is the one the rule is written for. The top tier is quoted per deal, because it is bought for the compliance surfaces by people who may run very little traffic, so it is billed at what was agreed, on the term that was agreed, from the start. See the pricing page for which tier is which.
- Every plan is available at any time. The threshold decides when a plan starts costing money, never what you are allowed to have. Nothing is withheld from an account because it has not earned enough yet.
Your own standing, meaning what the toll has paid you so far and whether that means your plan is billing, is on your billing page beside your invoice history.
Why it's built this way
Pooling money (taking the buyer's payment, holding it, then forwarding shares to authors later) is what turns a service into a money transmitter, with the licensing that implies. naulon avoids the whole category by never being in the flow of funds. The toll computes who is owed what and lets the buyer pay them directly. That's a deliberate design constraint, not a detail: it's what lets the service operate without holding a license to move your money.
For you it means two things:
- You get paid by readers, not by us. Your wallet is the destination in the transaction the agent signs. There's no payout schedule to wait on and no balance we could lose, freeze, or mishandle.
- You can prove it. Every settlement is an on-chain transaction against the wallets you published. The fee, the split, and the destination are all verifiable; you don't have to trust an internal 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 without paying again. You're charging for access to the work, not taxing every byte. When the license 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. Your buyer signs a payment authorization off-chain, at no gas cost to them, and we hand it straight to Circle. You are credited immediately and the article is served in the same request. Circle then collects authorizations from across the network and writes them to the chain together, in a single transaction, paying that transaction's gas itself.
Neither you nor the buyer pays a per-transaction network fee. That is what makes a tenth of a cent a workable price: settled one at a time, a payment has to be worth roughly a cent before the network fee stops eating it, and batching takes the floor down to a millionth of a dollar.
The practical consequence is that your settlement appears on-chain as part of a batch rather than as a transaction of its own. Your earnings, the amount, the address, and the buyer are all unchanged: the dashboard reads them back to you the same way, and each toll still records its own reference you can look up.
What you see
Earnings show up as transactions to your authors' wallets. The operator's view aggregates settled fees per site for support and reconciliation, but it reads recorded events, not a place money sits. The truth is the chain; the dashboard just reads it back to you.