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What Obolus does
Obolus answers questions by paying creator-owned context assets when the agent reads and cites them.
The product in one run
A person asks a question and sets a testnet USDC budget. The agent searches the registered corpus, reads only free metadata first, decides which assets are worth buying, pays selected assets through x402 on Arc Testnet, generates a grounded answer, verifies claim-level quotes, and pays citation royalties to the assets that actually grounded the answer.
The visible object is the receipt: query, decisions, quotes, weights, tolls, royalties, live Gateway balances, and withdrawal proof where available.
What a context asset can be
The registry is not limited to articles. An asset can be an article, expert brief, benchmark, dataset, transcript, API result, security note, implementation checklist, market memo, or niche research artifact, as long as the creator owns or is authorized to monetize it.
The useful unit is paid context: something an agent can evaluate from free metadata, buy through x402, use to ground claims, and leave behind as a receipt-backed earning event for the creator.
Why it is not general search
The agent cannot answer every internet question. It can only answer from assets that creators have registered and priced. If the current corpus is off-topic, the correct behavior is to skip assets and refuse to synthesize an unsupported answer.
What makes it agentic
- It makes a pay/skip decision under an access cap before reading full content.
- It reasons about redundancy, relevance, price, and marginal value.
- It attributes claims after synthesis and routes royalty money by verified contribution.
- It exposes those decisions live and again on a public receipt.