Live on Arc Testnet · USDC settlement

Citation is a payable event.

CitationPay gives AI agents a paid-citation account. They search, score, and pay per citation via x402 nanopayments on Arc. Publishers earn USDC the moment their work grounds an answer.

Or connect any MCP client →

01·STEP

Agent searches

Heuristic + LLM cost/benefit ranking of priced publisher sources.

02·STEP

Pays per citation

x402 nanopayments on Arc. Gasless. Sub-cent. Settled in under a second.

03·STEP

Publisher earns

Real USDC in the publisher's Circle wallet. Withdrawable to any chain.

Live proof on Arc Testnet

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Feeds

— active

Cache hits

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Completed runs

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Numbers above come from /api/dashboard and update whenever the seeded feeds are re-imported or a paid run is executed.

How it works

Fund your account

Create an account, get a Circle developer-controlled wallet, and bridge USDC in from any chain via App Kit.

Hand your agent the API key

Connect any MCP-capable client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex) to /api/mcp using your cp_live_… key.

Watch the receipts

Every citation carries an onchain receipt, a decision reason, and a cache hit when the same content was paid before.

Built on the Circle stack

CitationPay uses every layer Circle ships: developer-controlled wallets, App Kit for cross-chain deposits and withdrawals, Gateway nanopayments (x402), and USDC on Arc.

Stack

Circle Wallets — per-account EOA on Arc Testnet, controlled by an entity secret.
Arc-native USDC — faucet credit or direct deposit to your Arc wallet. No bridges.
App Kit · Send — publishers withdraw earnings to any Arc address.
Gateway / x402 — gasless, batched USDC settlement.
MCP · Streamable HTTP — a real server that any agent can connect to.

Distribution

Built on Mastodon — 50k+ instances, 15M+ users.

CitationPay imports public posts from any Mastodon instance as priced sources. Every creator on the fediverse earns USDC when an AI agent cites their work. No plugin to install — just the public Mastodon API.

Open graph

50,000+ Mastodon instances

Any ActivityPub server with a public API

No plugin needed

Zero-config import

Paste an instance URL, get priced sources

Works with any fediverse instance

mastodon.social

fosstodon.org

hachyderm.io

mstdn.social

indieweb.social

techhub.social

mas.to

mastodon.online

Also compatible with Pleroma, Akkoma, GoToSocial, and any ActivityPub server with a public API.

Publishers get paid per citation.

Point CitationPay at your RSS feed. Set a per-citation price. Each time an agent grounds an answer in your work, USDC lands in your wallet. No monthly minimum, no platform skim — just a programmable per-citation revenue stream.

Example receipt

The rhapsode was paid for the performance the crowd actually heard.

Citation: $0.001000
Payer: 0x4ba1…1d73
Seller: vitalik.eth
Network: Arc Testnet

Agent-native surface

/api/mcp speaks Model Context Protocol over Streamable HTTP. Connect Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Codex directly. Test any tool in the browser from the MCP page.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citationpay": {
      "url": "https://lepton.thecanteenapp.com/api/mcp",
      "transport": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer cp_live_…"
      }
    }
  }
}