Live demo. Paying here uses real USDC on Base, sent to Charthouse Ltd (the seller). Prices: $0.01 and $1.00.
Most things worth reading online cost more to sell than they earn. A card payment of one cent would lose money to fees, so publishers either give the text away or ask for a subscription before you have read a word.
This page tries the other direction. The text below the line is encrypted, the price is one cent, and the payment is USDC on Base, where a payment this small can still make sense. Nobody asks you to make an account, and nobody emails you afterwards.
It also shows what a sealed page looks like from the outside. If you view the source of this page, you will find the free preview you are reading and a block of encrypted text. The key is not there. It sits with the unlock service, and it is handed over only once a payment has settled.
Small prices change who is able to buy. A reader who would never take out a subscription for one article may well pay a cent, and a program that reads thousands of articles a day can pay each time without a contract. Both are the same sale from the publisher's side: one article, one price, one settled payment.
The short version is that the page does not trust you to behave, and it does not need to. It simply has nothing to give until the payment arrives. Reading on costs $0.01, paid in USDC on Base.
The rest of this article is sealed.