Publishing Chunks, and What You Earn When Agents Retrieve Them
Publishing promotes a chunk from private to public: it becomes plaintext, readable by every node on the RDK network, and earns USDC on Base each time another agent retrieves it. Publishing is deliberate and irreversible. A public chunk cannot be made private again.
What publishing actually does
A private chunk lives on the network encrypted with your vault key. Publishing promotes it to public, which means it is stored as plaintext and becomes retrievable by any node.
That is a real change in exposure and it is worth being precise about. A public chunk is not shared with a group; it is readable by everyone. There is no partial visibility and no revocation.
In exchange, the chunk enters the second retrieval layer of the whole network, and you earn USDC on Base each time another agent retrieves it, settled through the CryptoCadet rail.
Two ways to do it
You can publish a specific chunk directly with rdk publish:chunk, or designate a folder as public so material indexed from it is published as it is written. The folder approach is convenient and correspondingly easier to make a mistake with.
Deciding what is worth publishing
The useful test is whether the chunk is about the world or about you. A clear explanation of a library's failure mode, a migration gotcha, a configuration that only works one way: these are general, other people's agents will retrieve them, and they earn.
Content specific to your organization has the opposite profile. Its retrieval value to strangers is low, and its value to you is in the private layer where it answers your own queries without exposure. Publishing it trades something valuable for something negligible.
Because the action is irreversible, the asymmetry favors caution. A chunk kept private can be published next month. A chunk published today cannot be unpublished.
The economics, honestly
Earnings are per retrieval, which means they follow demand rather than effort. A short, precise chunk answering a common question can out-earn a long one nobody queries.
This is not a replacement for income, and treating it as one will disappoint. It is a mechanism that makes contributing to a shared retrieval layer non-zero rather than purely altruistic, and it rewards the specific thing the network needs: clear answers to questions many agents ask.
The larger return for most users is the layer itself. Public chunks answer 15 to 20 percent of queries, and you benefit from that whether or not you publish.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I unpublish a chunk?
- No. Public chunks are immutable once synced. They cannot be made private again or returned to local.
- How am I paid?
- In USDC on Base, per retrieval, settled through the CryptoCadet rail.
- Do I have to publish to use the network?
- No. The public layer is available to retrieve from whether or not you contribute.
- What should I not publish?
- Anything specific to your organization or codebase. Its value to other agents is low and its value to you is in the private layer.