The internet settled on a binary a long time ago. A page is either free, funded by ads that track you across the web, or it's behind a subscription that demands a long-term commitment before you've read a single word. Neither option respects the fact that most of what people consume online is a single article, a single video, a single moment of curiosity. Mtrly's bet is that nanopayments, billed per second of attention, make a third path possible.
Arc is a stablecoin-native rollup where USDC is the gas token. That single detail matters more than it sounds. Normal L2s bill you in ETH for every transaction, which means sub-cent payments are a fantasy — the gas exceeds the payment. Arc flips this: if you're paying in USDC anyway, then a transaction that moves two-hundredths of a penny worth of USDC is completely coherent with the gas model. Circle's Nanopayments layer then batches these offchain so you don't even pay gas for most of them.
The Mtrly extension watches the page you're on. If the URL is registered by a creator — a YouTube video, a blog post, a podcast transcript — the extension opens a session with the Mtrly backend and starts a clock. Every five seconds for video, or every three-second dwell on a paragraph for text, it calls the billing engine. The engine atomically debits your balance, credits 80% to the creator, and keeps 20% for the platform. No sign-up forms for each site. No subscription lock-ins. Just seconds of attention, priced in hundredths of a cent.
The critical UX question is what happens when the money runs out. Traditional paywalls slam a wall down and demand you commit to a plan. Mtrly's wall is softer: the extension pauses the video or re-blurs the next paragraph, and offers a top-up button that takes you to a balance page. You top up $1. You return. You keep reading. The meter keeps ticking. You paid two cents for the half-article you actually read, and neither you nor the creator had to sign anything.
There is an obvious question about trust. How do I know the extension isn't running the meter while I'm making a coffee? The answer is video-element event listeners — the meter only ticks while the video is actually playing, and for text only when the paragraph is fifty-percent in-viewport for three consecutive seconds. The extension is open-source; the content script is fifty lines. If you don't trust it, you can read it.
The harder question is collusion: what stops a creator from registering a URL, then running a bot that opens the page a thousand times to drain their own balance — or a competitor's? The honest answer is: nothing, in the hackathon build. The production design adds rate-limits per (viewer, creator) pair, challenge-response proofs of human attention, and a dispute window before offchain settlements are pushed onchain via Circle's x402 batch. For now, the simpler system demonstrates the economics.
If this works, the shape of the web changes slightly. Creators stop begging for monthly subscribers and start being paid for attention they actually capture. Readers stop installing adblockers because there are no ads to block. And the entire machinery runs on a blockchain settlement layer that, on any given second, is moving amounts of money too small for any traditional payment rail to profitably handle.