A per-download paper marketplace
Every read pays the researcher who wrote it.
Scholar402 charges a few cents in stablecoin every time a human — or an AI agent — opens the full text of a paper. Split automatically: 80% to the authors, 10% to the reviewers, 10% keeps the lights on. No subscriptions, no publisher middleman.
The problem
Three parties, none of them paid.
01 — The author
Writes the paper, sees none of the access revenue
Publishers charge $30–$50 per download. The person who did the research sees exactly $0 of it.
02 — The reviewer
Does unpaid labor that makes the paper trustworthy
Peer review is the whole reason a paper is worth reading — and the only academic labor market where the going rate is zero.
03 — The agent
Has no clean way to pay for what it reads
AI agents are becoming real consumers of paper content — but there's no account to create, no card to charge, no consent flow that works headless.
The mechanism
Paywall enforced by a status code, not a login.
Upload, price, split
A researcher uploads a PDF, sets a price between $0.10–$0.50, and assigns a revenue split across every co-author.
Abstract is free, full text is a 402
Anyone — human or agent — can read the abstract for nothing. Requesting the full PDF without payment returns an HTTP 402, with the price and payment address in the response.
The agent pays and retries
An x402-compatible client signs a stablecoin payment, attaches it to the retried request, and gets the PDF back — no human in the loop, no account, no card.
The split settles automatically
Every transaction is logged and swept into a scheduled payout run — co-authors by their configured share, reviewers evenly, no manual accounting.
Reviewer and platform shares are computed the same way and recorded per-transaction — the ledger, not a spreadsheet, is the source of truth for who's owed what.
Infrastructure
Built to run lean before it runs big.
Scholar402 runs entirely on Cloudflare's edge platform and the open x402 payment protocol — no servers to keep warm, no idle compute cost between downloads. The whole stack scales to zero when nobody's reading, and scales out globally the moment they are.
For partners & funders
Early, deliberately small, and looking for non-dilutive support first.
Where things stand
Scholar402 is pre-launch. The payment mechanism, revenue-split ledger, and payout engine are built and being verified end-to-end on testnet before a single euro is spent on growth.
This page exists to find early researchers willing to list a paper, agent builders who want a paper-access tool their agents can actually pay for, and funders who'd rather back something already built than a slide deck.
What we're looking for
- Non-dilutive grants first — infrastructure and protocol-research funding fits this project's actual shape better than equity at this stage.
- Researchers willing to be among the first papers listed.
- Feedback from anyone building AI agents that read and cite papers.
Get word when it opens.
No spam, no drip campaign — one email when Scholar402 is ready for its first real papers.
Researcher, agent builder, or funder — say which in the email and you'll hear back directly.