Coil, the blockchain startup created by Ripple’s former chief technology officer, Stefan Thomas, has officially entered its closed beta stage. The Coil project was first announced in May and was the impetus for Thomas’s move to part ways with Ripple.

The main goal of Coil is to make monetizing web content significantly easier and more efficient by using blockchain technology. The new platform will mainly target smaller web services that have a significantly more difficult time monetizing user data.

Coil will allow internet users to compensate content creators through a series of micropayments, which will prove to be more profitable than subscription services, or “pay as you go” services, especially for smaller websites that can’t garner as much regular traffic.

While speaking about Coil’s goal, Thomas said:

“If you're big you can have a subscription service like Netflix or Spotify. If you're big you can collect enough data about people to make a lot of money with ads like Facebook or Google. If you're small it's actually very hard right now to make money on the web.”

The latest phase for Coil is closed beta, which will allow a select group of prospective clients to test the platform, while offering suggestions and pointing out platform interface issues and bugs. Currently, Coil has not onboarded many public clients, although Thomas has noted that the platform has conducted passive integrations with sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Twitch.

The Coil platform is built on Interledger, an interoperability protocol for transactional payments that was developed by Thomas while he was the CTO at Ripple. Coil will also utilize Codius, a smart contract platform developed by Ripple in 2015.

A key feature of Coil that sets it apart from competing services, like Brave, Patreon, and Flattr, is that the platform allows websites to get paid in real time, eliminating lengthy waiting periods.

Thomas spoke about this benefit of Coil, saying:

“The website gets the money instantly as you're on the website, so they can actually react to it and provide extra services. That's never been possible before, so we're excited to see what people build with that.”