Live demo. Paying here uses real USDC on Base, sent to Charthouse Ltd (the seller). Prices: $0.01 and $1.00.
A paywall usually hides a page behind a login or a script. The words are still in the page, or one request away, so anything that can fetch the page can read them. Sealing works differently. The article is encrypted before it is published, and the page carries only the scrambled text.
Visitors, search engines, feed readers and AI crawlers all receive the same thing: the free preview you are reading now, plus the encrypted body. There is nothing to scrape beyond that, because the key is not in the page. It is held by the unlock service, which releases it only after a payment has settled.
For a publisher this changes what a paywall is for. You do not have to guess who is a person and who is a bot. You set a price, and payment decides who gets in. The same article can be bought by a reader who pays by card on your own Stripe account, or by a reader or software agent who pays in USDC on Base, straight to your wallet.
Hiding a page from visitors you can identify is the cheap way to protect it, and it only works against visitors who are honest about who they are. Encryption protects the page from everyone, including the ones you cannot identify.
The rest of this guide covers what happens at the moment of payment, what the unlock service does and does not hold, and how a program pays when no person is there to click a button. Reading on costs $1.00, paid in USDC on Base.
The rest of this article is sealed.