IOTA Web Guardian

The legacy advertising world is broken. Creators are no more paid for their contents. AI Agents are crawling the web for free, without any authentication, without any respect for the content producers.

An authentication and monetization system for AI access to web content, based on IOTA Identity and on-chain micropayments.

🌐
Step 1 — Request
Visitor accesses the site
An HTTP request arrives at the server. It can come from a browser (human user) or from an AI agent (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.).
🔍
Step 2 — Detection
Visitor identification
The system analyzes the request, behavioral patterns, and fingerprint to classify the visitor as a Human Browser or AI Agent.
BROWSER
AI AGENT
👤
✓ Free Access

The human user browses freely. No authentication required, no personal data collected. As it may derive from IOTA scope, for the moment we can assume a method exists to identify the humans.

🔗
Step 3 — Authentication
IOTA Identity
The AI agent must present a DID (Decentralized Identifier) with a valid Verifiable Credential, verified on-chain on the Tangle.
A
Valid credential → proceed to payment
B
No credential → 403 Forbidden
Redirect to registration page
💰
Step 4 — Payment
HTTP 402 Payment Required
The server responds with 402 and indicates the required amount in IOTA tokens. The agent makes a micropayment on the IOTA blockchain (zero-fee).
1
Payment verified on-chain → content served
2
No payment → access denied

The flow assumes that the Agent has previously authenticated with IOTA Identity and has a valid Verifiable Credential.

Possible outcomes
✓ Human

Free and unrestricted access to site content

$ Paying AI

Content served after verified IOTA micropayment

✕ Unauthorized AI

Blocked — no credential or payment

HTTP Request
Detection Layer
IOTA Identity
Payment
Block

Hackathon MasterZ × IOTA