#23Fiber Content Gate — Micropayment Access Control
Pay-per-access content for CKB. Creators register content metadata as Spore DOBs (proving ownership); access is unlocked by a Fiber invoice payment — sub-cent amounts, instant settlement, no subscriptions and no platform cut. Works for articles, music, video, APIs, and data feeds.
- CKB properties
- Fiber Network · Spore/DOB · First-Class Assets · Off-chain Compute / On-chain Verify
- Primitives
- Fiber node · Spore SDK · CCC
- Inspired by
- L402 / Lightning paywalls, adapted for Fiber + Spore
- Wants
- frontend · rust · product
- Author
- dir
- References
- Fiber Network
- Content is registered as a Spore DOB that records the creator's ownership and a pointer/commitment to the gated resource.
- An access protocol: a request to gated content returns a Fiber invoice; settling it yields a verifiable access grant (preimage-bound token) the gate accepts.
- A creator dashboard to publish content, set a per-access price, and view earnings.
- A consumer flow that pays the invoice and receives content with no account and no subscription.
- Demonstrated across at least two media types (e.g. an article and an API endpoint).
- Deployed against Fiber testnet with docs and a reference server library.
Problem
Monetizing a single article, song, or API call on CKB today has no good path. On-chain payments are too heavy and slow for a sub-cent unlock, and the existing Fiber tooling is narrow: Fiber Link does Discourse tipping only, while general content monetization doesn't exist. The result is that creators fall back to subscriptions and walled platforms that take a cut and own the relationship with the reader. There is no general-purpose, pay-as-you-go content gate.
Why CKB
Fiber gives the missing piece account chains lack: instant, sub-cent settlement over payment channels, so charging a fraction of a cent to read one article is actually viable. Pairing it with Spore DOBs means the content itself is a first-class, creator-owned asset on-chain — ownership and provenance are provable, not a row in a platform's database — while the heavy bytes stay off the ledger and only the unlock is verified. The payment preimage doubles as a clean, verifiable access grant: pay, get the secret, the gate checks it. This is off-chain compute (serving content) with on-chain/Fiber-anchored verification.
Spec
- Content registry: each piece of content is a Spore DOB recording creator ownership, price, and a commitment to the resource (hash or encrypted pointer).
- Access protocol: an unauthorized request returns a Fiber invoice (L402-style). The payer settles it; the payment preimage binds an access grant the gate verifies before releasing the resource (or a decryption key).
- Creator tooling: dashboard to mint content DOBs, set prices, rotate keys, and see revenue.
- Server library: drop-in middleware so any backend can gate a route behind a Fiber invoice.
For consumer-facing unlocks, a gated resource can be shared as a CKB Action Link (idea #22): one click, pay, read.
Mini-demo
Sketch: a writer publishes an essay as a content DOB priced at 0.3 CKB. A reader hits the URL, gets a Fiber invoice, pays it in a tap, and the essay renders — no signup, no subscription, and 100% of the payment reaches the writer.
References / prior art
Compare Lightning L402 paywalls; Fiber Link (Discourse tipping) shows the tipping slice but not general monetization. See fiber.world for the network. This generalizes both to arbitrary media with on-chain ownership via Spore.