Readers who visit the Chicago Sun-Times today will notice something they aren’t likely to have seen before: a bitcoin paywall separating them from their content.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the ninth-largest newspaper in the United States, and the first major US publication to trial a bitcoin paywall.

Instead of paying for a subscription, as patrons of the The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times do, Chicago Sun-Times readers who visit the site on 1st February will be asked to donate bitcoin payments to the Taproot Foundation, or tweet about the nonprofit, in order to read articles.

The paywall is part of a 24-hour trial that marks the largest, most high-profile partnership to date for BitWall, a San Francisco-based micropayments startup, and the biggest test to date for bitcoin micropayments. However, if BitWall and the Sun-Times are able to succeed in their goals, this may be something newshounds will be seeing a lot more.

Speaking to CoinDesk about the announcement, CEO and co-founder Nic Meliones reiterated the importance of the trial for his roughly one-year-old company and for the ecosystem:

“I think that this has definitely given us the chance to prove that we can launch full-time with large-scale publishers. That’s why this partnership was so huge for us.”

Behind the partnership

Though BitWall is a young company, Meliones said it was the Sun-Times that reached out to his team at the beginning of December. A meeting was arranged, and Meliones and his team gave a successful demo showing the capabilities of BitWall.

Jim Kirk, editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, told CoinDesk his publication had been exploring new ways to monetize content for several months before the meeting.