ETHGlobal Cannes 2026

NanoCrawl

HTTP-native micropayments for AI data access. Publishers set a price. AI agents pay per page — off-chain, zero gas. Humans browse for free.

Live Dashboard Get Started as Merchant Build a Paying Agent

The Problem

The web is broken for AI. Publishers block crawlers and earn nothing. Crawlers scrape anyway and risk lawsuits. NanoCrawl is the payment layer in between — an MCP server gives any AI agent a wallet, and a one-line middleware lets any publisher monetise their content at sub-cent granularity.

Architecture

The full round-trip: x402 over HTTP, off-chain EIP-3009 signing, Circle Gateway batch settlement on Arc, and dual withdrawal paths.

Cloudflare controls access.
NanoCrawl defines how machines pay for it.

Cryptographic, not accounting

Every payment is a signed EIP-3009 authorization — verifiable on-chain, non-repudiable, settled in batches. Cloudflare-style billing aggregates usage centrally. Circle Nanopayments signs per request.

Agent-native by design

No accounts. No billing cycles. No API keys. An AI agent reads robots.txt, discovers the price, signs off-chain, and pays — all autonomously via MCP. Sub-cent granularity makes per-page economics viable.

Cross-chain out of the box

Payments settle on Arc — where USDC is the native gas token, so merchants pay nothing to receive. Circle CCTP lets them sweep to Base, Unichain, or any supported chain in one call. No bridging UX, no manual steps.

⚡

Complements Cloudflare — doesn't compete

Cloudflare excels at detection and enforcement. NanoCrawl is the payment layer that plugs in behind it. Our Cloudflare Worker template deploys NanoCrawl as a Worker in front of any origin — Cloudflare guards the gate, NanoCrawl handles the economics.

How It Works

①

Crawler hits a protected page

Middleware classifies the request as a crawler. Returns HTTP 402 with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header encoding price, network, and seller address.

②

Agent signs off-chain

MCP server reads the 402, signs an EIP-3009 authorization off-chain — zero gas, no on-chain transaction. Retries with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header.

③

Content delivered, revenue recorded

Circle Gateway verifies the signature and locks funds. Merchant sees revenue on the dashboard in real time. Merchant sweeps to any chain via CCTP.

See It Live

Two curl commands. The protocol is plain HTTP — no SDK, no wallet, no account.

Step 1 — hit a paid page, get a 402

curl -si https://nanocrawl.vercel.app/products/1 \
  -H "User-Agent: AI-Crawler/1.0" \
  | head -6

# HTTP/2 402
# payment-required: eyJ4NDAyVmVyc2lvbiI6MiwiYWNjZXB0cy...
# content-type: application/json
#
# {"x402Version":2,"accepts":[{"scheme":"exact","network":"eip155:5042002",
#  "asset":"0x3600...","amount":"1000","payTo":"0xSeller..."}]}

Step 2 — sign EIP-3009 off-chain, retry with signature

curl -si https://nanocrawl.vercel.app/products/1 \
  -H "User-Agent: AI-Crawler/1.0" \
  -H "PAYMENT-SIGNATURE: <base64-eip3009>" \
  | head -4

# HTTP/2 200
# payment-response: eyJzdWNjZXNzIjp0cnVlLCJ0cmFuc2FjdGlvbiI6...
# {"id":1,"name":"Widget Alpha","price":29.99,...}

Or fetch the machine-readable manifest:curl https://nanocrawl.vercel.app/.well-known/ai-pay

Key Properties

✓

Zero gas per payment

EIP-3009 off-chain authorization — no on-chain tx until batch settlement

✓

HTTP-native

Standard 402 status code. No SDK required on the publisher side

✓

Human pass-through

Browser signals detected. Humans never see a paywall

✓

Cross-chain withdrawal

CCTP: burn USDC on Arc, mint on Base, Unichain, or any supported chain

✓

Idempotent payments

UUID-based deduplication. Safe to retry on network failure

✓

Drop-in for any site

Cloudflare Worker template gates any origin — static sites, APIs, R2 buckets

Built On

Circle Nanopayments

EIP-3009 · CCTP · Gateway

x402 Protocol

HTTP payment standard

Arc Testnet

USDC as native gas

Model Context Protocol

AI agent wallet layer