Charon

Read freely. Pay for what it's worth. Creators earn every chapter.

A nanopayment reading platform for webnovels and manga. Readers deposit USDC once and read without hitting a paywall; when you finish a chapter, Charon settles its current (engagement-adjusted) price to the creator on Arc via x402 — pay once per chapter, re-reads free. You can also hand the reading to an autonomous agent that learns your taste, holds a weekly budget, and discovers and pays for chapters on your behalf.

Charon — the ferryman took one coin per crossing. Every chapter is a crossing. The coin is automatic.

Built for the Lepton Agents Hackathon (Canteen × Circle × Arc) · RFB 06 Creator Monetization + RFB 01 Autonomous Paying Agents.

The agents

Charon runs a handful of agents. Each makes a single structured-JSON decision (Claude via OpenRouter) over deterministically-gathered signals, with a deterministic fallback so the loop always completes. All money math is enforced in code (lib/pricing.ts) — the model only chooses direction, magnitude, and the one-sentence reasoning shown in the UI.

Agent	Fires	What it does
Creator Pricing (`lib/agents/pricing.ts`)	on chapter upload	Sets a base price from word count, genre benchmarks, series following + momentum. Creator can override.
Dynamic Repricing (`lib/agents/repricing.ts`)	hourly cron (`/api/cron/reprice`)	Adjusts each chapter's price from demand, time decay, momentum, completion + re-read signals — capped at ±20%/day, never below floor.
Budget Allocation (`lib/agents/budget.ts`)	reader dashboard (`/api/me/budget`) + daily cron (`/api/cron/budget`)	Tracks reading pace, warns on low balance, suggests a calibrated top-up, and flags series where pre-release mode fits.
Autonomous Reader Agent (`lib/agents/reader-agent.ts`)	`/agent` "Run now" + fleet cron (`/api/cron/agent`)	Holds a learned taste profile + weekly budget and discovers, evaluates, and pays for chapters on the reader's behalf — within budget, over the same Arc / x402 rail (tagged `caller_type = 'agent'`, 7% fee that funds the agent itself).

The reader agent gets its own real on-chain wallet (lib/agent-wallet.ts): a real Arc keypair funded each week from the reader's balance with native USDC on Arc testnet (scannable on arcscan), with unspent budget returned at week reset. It exposes chat, a live activity feed, "Run now", and pause via /api/agent/*.

Note on session pricing: the per-read charge is deterministic — the chapter's current price (set by the pricing agents above) minus the reader's loyalty / binge / discovery discounts, capped by the session cap + balance (app/api/session/end). There is no per-session AI valuation.

Payment modes

Pay-per-read (default) — read first; on finishing, you're charged the chapter's current price minus your discounts. Pay once per chapter; re-reads free.
Pre-release — subscribers are auto-charged and unlocked the instant a chapter drops.
Series Pass — one discounted payment (85% of full cost) unlocks a series; sessions stop charging.

Architecture

Reader ──reads──▶ Chapter UI ──tracks──▶ /api/session/end
   │                (time, scroll, re-reads, binge)     │
   │                                  deterministic price (lib/pricing.ts):
   │                                  chapter price − loyalty/binge/discovery
   ▼                                                     ▼
 ledger (Supabase) ◀── debit ──────────────  settleSession()  ── x402 ──▶ /api/settle
                                                     │                  (treasury pays)
                                                     ▼                        │
                                          payments + loyalty           Arc testnet ──▶ creator wallet
                                                     │                        │  (or escrow → Circle PW)
                                                     ▼                        ▼
                                       Creator dashboard (realtime balance ticks up)

Autonomous agent:  /api/cron/agent ─▶ runAgent() ─▶ fund agent wallet (real USDC on Arc)
                                          │            ─▶ discover + evaluate (taste profile)
                                          └─▶ settleSession() at 7% fee ─▶ creators

Reader balances are a Supabase ledger over a pooled Arc treasury wallet.
Settlement is the proven x402 path: the treasury pays the gated /api/settle endpoint, moving USDC to the creator's Arc address (lib/arc.ts, lib/payer.ts).
Escrow / offramp: creators without a wallet accrue escrow + get a Circle Programmable Wallet (lib/circle.ts); they withdraw to wallet or bank. Guarded — if Circle keys are unset, escrow is ledger-only and the app still works.

Stack

Next.js 16 (App Router) · Tailwind 4 · Supabase (Postgres) · Claude via OpenRouter · Circle Programmable Wallets · Arc nanopayments + x402 (@circle-fin/x402-batching) · viem (agent on-chain wallet) · Vercel.

Run it

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local            # fill in keys

# 1. Apply the schema — paste supabase/schema.sql into the Supabase SQL editor
# 2. Create + fund the Arc treasury wallet
npm run generate-wallets              # writes TREASURY_WALLET_* (then faucet.circle.com → Arc testnet)
npm run dev

# 3. Verify the rail, then seed demo content
npm run settle-smoke                  # treasury settles $0.01 on Arc, prints a tx hash
npm run seed                          # demo creator + "Iron Ascension" / "The Lantern Court" + funded reader

Then open /read, onboard a reader in /onboarding (deposit a balance), read a chapter and watch the creator balance tick up live — or open /agent, set a taste profile + weekly budget, and hit "Run now" to watch it buy chapters itself.

Scripts

npm run generate-wallets — create the Arc treasury wallet
npm run fund-gateway — top up the treasury's x402 Gateway deposit
npm run settle-smoke — prove the Arc settlement rail end-to-end
npm run seed — seed demo creator, series, chapters, and a funded reader (idempotent)
npm run demo-pricing — simulate demand on a chapter and watch Dynamic Repricing move its price (capped at ±20%)
npm run import-asterion — import the bundled demo series

Cron (Vercel)

Three cron routes, each authed with CRON_SECRET (Vercel Cron sends it as a bearer token; append ?key=$CRON_SECRET to trigger manually):

/api/cron/agent — run every active reader's autonomous agent
/api/cron/reprice — hourly Dynamic Repricing across all chapters
/api/cron/budget — daily low-balance sweep

A vercel.json is not committed — add one (or configure crons in the Vercel dashboard) to schedule them:

{
  "crons": [
    { "path": "/api/cron/agent",   "schedule": "0 * * * *" },
    { "path": "/api/cron/reprice", "schedule": "0 * * * *" },
    { "path": "/api/cron/budget",  "schedule": "0 8 * * *" }
  ]
}

Routes

Reader — / landing · /read browse/discover · /series/[id] · /series/[id]/[chapter] · /chapter/[id] reader · /onboarding · /dashboard · /wallet · /library · /profile · /agent autonomous agent · /join.

Creator — /creator/studio · /creator/dashboard · /creator/[seriesId] (+ /upload, /edit/[chapterId]) · /creator/analytics · /creator/audience · /creator/onboarding · /creator/claim · /creator/withdraw · /author/[slug] public profile.

Admin — /admin overview · /admin/login · /admin/content · /admin/creators · /admin/users · /admin/payments (email allowlist or ops-admin login; /api/admin/*).

Public — /stats live stats.

Screens

Screenshots live in public/screenshots/ — see that folder's README for the shot list and a capture guide.

Roadmap

Tracked against the Lepton Agents Hackathon scoring (agentic sophistication · traction · Circle tool usage · innovation). Checked = shipped.

Shipped

Real seed stats — back every catalog number with a real DB row (defends the traction score)
Gift / tips via Circle App Kit Send — real wallet-to-wallet USDC transfers
Revenue-split contract — deploy one Arc contract for co-author / editor splits
Threaded comments + real (paid-gated) ratings
Profile pictures (avatar upload)
AI reading guide ("Ask Charon") that can hand off to the reader-agent
Per-second streaming reads (RFB 4)

Manga

Real manga content + dedicated panel reader
Panel-viewport payment valuation (replaces scroll velocity for image chapters)

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
app		app
components		components
drafts		drafts
lib		lib
mobile		mobile
public		public
scripts		scripts
supabase		supabase
.env.example		.env.example
.gitignore		.gitignore
.mailmap		.mailmap
MOBILE-APP-PLAN.md		MOBILE-APP-PLAN.md
PERF-AND-READER-PLAN.md		PERF-AND-READER-PLAN.md
README.md		README.md
logo-charon.svg		logo-charon.svg
logo-charons.svg		logo-charons.svg
next.config.ts		next.config.ts
package-lock.json		package-lock.json
package.json		package.json
pages.txt		pages.txt
postcss.config.mjs		postcss.config.mjs
tsconfig.json		tsconfig.json

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Charon

Read freely. Pay for what it's worth. Creators earn every chapter.

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Charon

Read freely. Pay for what it's worth. Creators earn every chapter.

The agents

Payment modes

Architecture

Stack

Run it

Scripts

Cron (Vercel)

Routes

Screens

Roadmap

Shipped

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