Wow. Let me start off this update by thanking all of you for an incredible first month. We launched Coil into closed beta testing 30 days ago and we’ve already learned a lot.

So far, we’ve only given out a very small number of invites. We’re working hard on the product and are planning to let in more users soon.

In the meantime, creators aren’t waiting around. More than 500 websites and YouTube channels have already become Web Monetization enabled. We’re excited about continuing this growth going forward. To show who’s using Coil, we created a barebones Explore page.

With many web monetized sites coming online, we’ve decided to remove our integrations with Wikipedia and Archive.org which were intended to give our very first users some places to try out Web Monetization.

Unfortunately, a lot of people mistook our decision to support Wikipedia as an official partnership or endorsement, so we want to be very clear that that was never our intent and we apologize for any confusion.

So what’s next? One of the unique features of Web Monetization is that the website is paid in real-time. This allows creators to provide ad-free experiences, exclusive content, and new kinds of applications. While Coil today is largely about donations, very soon we want to show how Web Monetization can improve your browsing experience. Stay tuned!

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Stefan Thomas
Founder at Coil, formerly CTO at Ripple