I work in finance, but in my spare time, I like to write.

Those two things don't often go together in people's minds, but they've always coexisted naturally for me. Finance taught me to think about incentives and numbers: who gets paid, how much, and why. Writing taught me something harder to quantify: what it feels like to create something on the page and wonder if anyone will care enough to read it.

For years, those two worlds stayed separate. Then I started noticing how broken the economics of writing on the internet had become, and I couldn't unsee it.

The internet gave us something remarkable. We now have the ability to share ideas with anyone in the world, instantly, at no cost. We told ourselves this was pure progress, that only good could come out of this. But we were wrong.

When everything is free, attention becomes the currency, but it turns out attention is a terrible currency. It rewards volume over quality, controversy over nuance, and virality over truth. The algorithm doesn't care if an article took three hours or three minutes to write. It cares if people clicked.

The result is a world wide web of slop. Endless, optimized, engagement-baiting slop. Content written to be skimmed, not read. Articles designed to provoke, not illuminate. An ocean of words that leave you feeling like you're drowning in them rather than staring in awe.

I, for one, am tired of it. I want to read things worth reading. And I suspect plenty of writers have grown tired of producing work into a system that reward the wrong things.

One answer is Substack. Sign up, set a monthly price, build a subscriber base. Simple enough. But subscriptions have their own problems.

A $5/month subscription to read one writer means committing before you know if their writing is worth your time. Readers face a binary choice: subscribe to everything and pay too much, or subscribe to nothing and miss things worth reading. There's no middle ground. There's no way to say "I'll pay for this specific article because it looks genuinely interesting."

And for writers, subscriptions require a minimum viable audience before they make any economic sense. If you have 20 readers who love your work, a subscription model earns you almost nothing. You need hundreds of paying subscribers to make it worthwhile. That means most writers, the ones still building an audience, the ones who write occasionally rather than professionally, are effectively locked out of earning anything.

There's also the personal information problem. Most platforms require writers to reveal identifying information, connect bank accounts, or go through payment processors that take meaningful cuts and introduce friction at every step.

I wanted something different. I wanted a platform where a reader could pay a small amount to unlock a single article. Where a writer could publish without handing over personal details or negotiating with a payment processor. Where someone with 20 dedicated readers could earn money from those 20 readers, without needing 2,000.

But how could I make this technically possible?

This is where eCash comes into play. I've been following the eCash team since the Bitcoin Cash days. Amaury Séchet and the Bitcoin ABC engineers had a clear and consistent mission to build the electronic cash system that Satoshi Nakamoto described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

When I started thinking about how to build Proof of Writing, I never seriously considered another chain because eCash was the obvious choice, and the reasons are straightforward:

Transaction fees are negligible. On Ethereum, a $0.50 micropayment is economically absurd. Gas fees would dwarf the payment itself. On eCash, sending a few hundred XEC costs a few XEC, which is less than a thousandth of a cent. Micropayments become genuinely viable.

Finality is fast. With the Avalanche Pre-Consensus upgrade, eCash transactions finalize in under three seconds. A reader pays, the writer gets paid, the article unlocks. Basically all in the time it takes to read a sentence. There's no waiting, no uncertainty.

The developer tools are serious. Chronik, eCash's in-node indexer, makes it straightforward to verify transactions and build reliable payment flows. Cashtab provides a non-custodial wallet that readers can use without signing up for anything or revealing their identity. The BIP21 payment link format let me build a clean payment experience without reinventing infrastructure from scratch.

I'll be honest, I was surprised by how easy it was. I expected building something like this would be a months-long ordeal of cryptographic complexity and frustrating edge cases. The eCash developer ecosystem is mature enough that the technical barriers were lower than I anticipated. What I thought would be the hard part turned out to be fairly easy. The hard part, as it always is, will be figuring out how to get people to actually use this platform.

The idea of Proof of Writing is simple. Writers publish their work and set a price in XEC. Readers who want to read pay that fee directly to the writer. No middleman holds the money. No subscriptions required. No accounts required. The reader opens Cashtab, sends the XEC, and the article unlocks.

Writers keep 94% of every payment. The remaining 6% supports the platform.

A writer with 20 readers who each pay 1,000 XEC per article earns real money. A writer with 2,000 readers earns more. The economics work at every scale and not just for established writers with large audiences.

Readers pay for what they actually want to read, not for access to everything a writer might ever publish. That changes the relationship. A payment is a signal. When someone unlocks your article, they didn't accidentally scroll past it but made a deliberate choice.

There's one more feature worth mentioning, because it grew out of something I personally wanted. Writers can add an AI audio narration of their article for a small one-time fee in XEC. The audio is generated from the full text and becomes available to any reader who unlocks the post. But I've found it useful for something the feature wasn't originally designed for: listening back to my own writing. Hearing your words read aloud reveals things that reading silently doesn't like sentences that run too long, rhythm that falls flat, or arguments that sound confident on the page but hollow when spoken. It's become part of my own editing process. The fact that readers can also benefit from it by being able to listen during their commute, or going for a run, is an added bonus. Writing that can be listened to is writing that travels further, and writing that travels further has a better chance of earning the attention it deserves.

In three years, I want Proof of Writing to be the platform known for offering genuinely good writing at reasonable prices. Not a content farm. Not a viral factory. A place where writers of any audience size can earn money for their work without surrendering their economics to a platform or their identity to a payment processor.

I want the eCash community to be central to that. The people who understand XEC already understand the value of permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions. They understand what it means to be paid directly, without an intermediary deciding whether your payment gets through.

And I want to prove something about micropayments more broadly: that when the fee structure is right, and the friction is low enough, people will pay for things they value. Not because they have to. Because they want to.

For the non crypto native writer, I understand the skepticism. Crypto has earned every bit of it.

But I'd ask you to separate the speculation from the infrastructure. eCash isn't a bet on a price chart, it's a tool like any other, a payment rail that lets you skip the intermediaries and bypass the rent-seekers while going direct to your customers.

You can only grow by exploring new opportunities. The writers who figure this out early will have an advantage over those who wait until it's obvious.

Publish something. Set a price. See what happens. But what you earn is totally up to you and your ability to create and market content people are willing to pay for.

The platform is proofofwriting.com. The article you're reading, or maybe listening to, is on it.

If this resonated with you, share it. The best way to support what we're building here is to introduce one more person to the idea that writing, and the attention it earns, is worth something.

Why I Built Proof of Writing on eCash🎧