The Tollway protocol brings structure to how AI agents access the web. Just as robots.txt told crawlers what they could read, tollway.json tells agents what they can do — and how much it costs.
Agents identify themselves with a DID (Decentralized Identifier) and sign every request with an Ed25519 key. Sites respond with policies covering training permissions, pricing, attribution requirements, and rate limits.
When a resource requires payment, the server returns HTTP 402 with payment details. The agent pays in USDC on Base and retries with a transaction receipt. The whole flow happens in milliseconds.