The meed

What it is. Exactly 1% (100 basis points) of each payment — the same on every payment, and no single participant can raise it.

It earns on the middle, not the whales. The largest bilateral pairs settle directly and skip the meed, as they would route around any fee on any rail. PayTP is built to earn on the vast middle of the web's payments, not on the handful of players big enough to negotiate their own terms — a limit of the design, stated plainly rather than hidden.

Optional services (up to +0.5%). Separately from the meed, a merchant may offer opt-in in-protocol services — escrow, dispute resolution — that a flow can add. These cost up to a further 0.5%, are the merchant's choice, and never touch or reduce the 1% base.

Why it works this way. Much of the hard part of a modern payment happens before any money moves, on the payer's side: software has to hold identity, verify funds, protect privacy, and turn an intent into a payment the merchant can trust. That software has no customer to bill for it, so open payment standards never won its support. The meed gives it a fixed, on-the-wire reason to carry the protocol — rather than leaving that to a sponsor's subsidy, which comes with an agenda and can be repriced once everyone depends on it.

Who it pays. The enabling software — the interaction layer (a browser or agent framework), the wallet, the operating system — together with a Development Fund for audits and upkeep. The largest share goes to the interaction layer because distribution, not custody, is the scarce part: the layer that decides whether a payment path ships at all.

Who pays it, and why a merchant agrees. It is carved from the merchant's side — the buyer pays the listed price and nothing more. A merchant accepts the meed the way it accepts any distribution cost: it reaches the buyers PayTP-aware software brings — including agents that pay by the call — with no card-style chargeback liability for the merchant, and settlement as fast as the chosen rail allows rather than held in reserve for weeks. Like card interchange or app-store commissions, it is paid for reach — at a markedly lower cost than those channels charge.

Who controls it. No one, unilaterally: the schedule is fixed by the protocol, and no participant can enlarge its own share. How it is kept neutral — a planned Foundation with separated powers, an absent role that gains no one, and a right to fork — is its own page: governance.

No one is locked in. The meed is not forced on anyone — plain x402, cards, and direct transfers are always available and meed-free, just as cash pays no card interchange. Not paying it simply means not using PayTP, and forgoing what its software provides. It is collected where PayTP-aware software carries the payment, because that is where it earns: the software that reports the meed is the software it pays. The specification is candid about the edges (within a channel the accounting is tamper-evident, not tamper-proof; the one-shot baseline divides the meed by construction) rather than hiding them.