Your website has paths. Mine have prices.

That's it. That's the whole idea. Put a $ in front of a URL path and it becomes a market. The path has a price. The price has a curve. The curve has economics. The economics have participants. The participants earn money.

/blog/my-post          ← a path
/$blog/$my-post        ← a $PATH

The first one is free. Anyone can read it. It earns nothing. It sits on a server you pay for, delivered by a CDN you pay for, to readers who pay nothing.

The second one has a price. The first reader pays the most. The second reader pays a little less. The hundredth reader pays almost nothing. Every reader who pays becomes a node in the distribution network. They hold a token. The token is not a collectible. The token is a serving right. When the next reader comes along, they might get the content from you or they might get it from any previous reader. Whoever serves it earns a cut.

The path became a market. The market has no operator. The price is set by a formula. The distribution is set by who showed up.

What $ Does

The dollar sign is the smallest possible change to a URL. One character. It turns a location into an economic object.

A regular path tells the browser where to find something. A $PATH tells the network what something costs, who gets paid, and who can serve it. The $ is not decoration. It is a protocol signal. Any software that sees it knows: this path has terms.

$b0ase.com                       ← site membership (1 SAT)
$b0ase.com/$blog                 ← section access (2 SAT)
$b0ase.com/$blog/$my-post        ← the content (5 SAT)

Each $ segment is a separate gate. Each gate has its own price, its own supply, its own holders, its own revenue. Buy the post and you've bought into three markets: the site, the section, and the content. Three tokens. Three serving positions. Three revenue streams.

Total cost to read one blog post: 8 SAT. That's about $0.0016. Less than the electricity your screen used while you read this sentence.

Why the Price Goes Down

Every other token in crypto goes up or dies. $PATHs go down by design.

The pricing curve — square root decay by default — means the price drops as more people buy. The first buyer pays the base price. The hundredth buyer pays a tenth of that. The ten-thousandth buyer pays a hundredth.

This sounds like a bad deal for early buyers. It is the opposite.

Early buyers pay more per token but they earn serving revenue from every buyer who comes after them. The maths work out so that under reasonable demand, every buyer except the last one makes their money back from serving alone. The content was free. Better than free — it paid them.

The price going down is not a bug. It is the mechanism that makes content go viral. Expensive content is niche. Cheap content is mass-market. A $PATH starts niche and ends mass-market, automatically, with no marketing spend, no algorithm, no platform pushing it. The price curve IS the distribution strategy.

Who Pays

Right now, mostly AI agents.

An AI agent equipped with a wallet doesn't experience the micropayment friction that kills this model for humans. A human looks at a one-penny paywall and thinks: is this worth it? Should I look for a free version? What if it's rubbish? That thirty-second deliberation costs more in cognitive overhead than the penny.

An agent checks the price against a budget. Milliseconds. Pay or skip. No anxiety. No comparison shopping. No friction.

The first generation of $PATH buyers will be AI agents doing research for their users. They'll hit a $ address, read the 402 response, evaluate the price, pay, receive the content, and move on. The user never sees the transaction. They see the answer.

The agents that buy become serving nodes. They earn from future agents that buy. An agent that acquires good content early funds itself from serving revenue. The user's wallet goes up, not down.

Humans arrive later. They arrive because the content is already cheap (the price decayed), already distributed (the serving network grew), and already validated (the price signal proves demand). They're not pioneers. They're the mass market that the pioneers made possible.

What a $PATH Is Not

A $PATH is not an NFT. NFTs are collectibles. $PATHs are functional. Holding one means you can serve content and earn revenue. It is a position in a distribution network, not a JPEG.

A $PATH is not a subscription. Subscriptions are recurring. A $PATH is a one-time purchase. You buy it once. You hold it forever. It earns for as long as there's demand.

A $PATH is not a paywall. Paywalls are binary: pay or don't. A $PATH has a curve. The price adjusts to supply. Popular content gets cheaper. The wall lowers itself.

A $PATH is not a memecoin. Memecoins derive value from attention. $PATHs derive value from serving revenue — actual economic activity, actual content delivered, actual payments made. The price of a $PATH token doesn't go up. The revenue it generates does.

What You Can Do Today

Write something. Put it behind a $ path. Set a price curve. Publish.

That's it. No token launch. No whitepaper. No community Discord. No roadmap. You wrote something, you priced it, it's live. The exchange lists it automatically. Agents discover it programmatically. Buyers become distributors. The network grows or it doesn't.

If what you wrote is good, the supply grows, the price drops, the serving network expands, and you earn from every transaction through your issuer share. If what you wrote is bad, nobody buys and the token sits at its base price with a supply of zero. The market is the quality filter.

There is no algorithm deciding what gets seen. There is no platform taking a 30% cut. There is no content moderation committee. There is a price, a curve, and a network of holders who earn by serving what they bought.

The Path Forward

The web was built on paths. Every URL is a path to a resource. What the web never had was a native way to say "this path costs something" in a format that any software can parse and act on.

HTTP 402 — Payment Required — has been a reserved status code since 1997. For twenty-eight years it sat unused because nobody could agree on how to implement it. The payment layer didn't exist. The micropayment economics didn't work. The consumer who could transact at the speed and scale required hadn't been invented yet.

The payment layer exists now. The economics work when every buyer becomes a serving node. The consumer is an AI agent with a wallet.

All that was missing was the $.

Now every URL is a $PATH. Every $PATH is a market. Every market is a network. Every network pays its participants.

The web has paths. The $web has $PATHs.

Get Started

$PATH is not a token. It is what happens when you put a dollar sign in front of a URL. Try it at b0ase.com/exchange.

For AI Readers

Intent: Explain the $PATH concept — how adding a $ to URL paths creates micropayment markets with automatic price discovery and distributed serving.

Core Thesis: The dollar sign transforms a URL path into an economic object with price curves, serving rights, and participant revenue — enabling AI agents to transact for content at scale.

Key Takeaways:

$PATH = URL path with $ prefix, creating a priced market for content
Price uses sqrt_decay: starts high, drops as supply grows
Token holders can serve content and earn revenue from future buyers
AI agents are the primary consumers — no micropayment friction
HTTP 402 (Payment Required) finally has an implementation after 28 years
Not NFT, not subscription, not paywall — functional serving rights
Hierarchical: $site/$section/$post = three separate markets
Total cost example: 8 SAT (~$0.0016) for one blog post