Building a Pay-Per-Article Paywall in Two Weeks

I'm building Inkpay for the Lepton hackathon — a tool that lets any Ghost blog charge readers a fraction of a cent per article instead of forcing a subscription.

The core idea: most readers won't commit to a monthly subscription for one article, but plenty would happily pay $0.001 to read something specific. Nanopayments make that possible for the first time without losing most of the payment to fees.

The technical challenge wasn't the AI pricing agent — that part was straightforward. It was understanding how Circle's Gateway actually works under the hood. Payments aren't pulled directly from a reader's wallet; they deposit into a smart contract once, then spend from that balance instantly per article, like loading a transit card.

This post itself is paywalled using Inkpay. If you're reading past this sentence, the unlock actually worked.

Why Some Clips Go Viral in Japan and Never Leave

There's a specific category of Japanese content that explodes domestically and almost never crosses over — drama clips with zero context, captions assuming you already know the backstory, reaction-bait that only makes sense if you've followed the discourse for weeks. Western algorithms aren't built

Web3/Crypto take

For years, the idea of paying $0.001 for anything on-chain was a joke. Gas fees alone cost more than the transaction itself, so "micropayments" stayed a buzzword nobody could actually ship. That changed with infrastructure like Circle's Gateway batching on Arc. Instead of settling

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Why Some Clips Go Viral in Japan and Never Leave

Web3/Crypto take

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