Bot management for a changing internet

Anteroom is the first of a series of Radius product launches and blog posts focused on the Changing Shape of Internet Traffic.

Radius’ head of Research & Development, Anders Brownworth, has run bitcoin-supply.com for six years. Using live chain data, his site provides a view into the total effective supply of Bitcoin based on usage and the extent to which the supply is exposed to quantum computing risk.

In July, Anders posted about that quantum vulnerable supply and linked back to the site. Shortly after, the site experienced a surge of requests, going from an average of around 350 to 1500 daily users. The site was overrun, straining his server and preventing users form loading the page. Because each visit to Anders’s site triggers a computationally expensive database call, a conventional CDN that doesn’t reduce the load wouldn’t solve his cost issue. All sites with embedded search functions know this pain.

Since then, the requests have kept coming. His site is sitting in the internet’s new and evolving traffic paradigm: high volume and high volatility. We built a bot management tool that let’s site owners like Anders understand, manage, and adapt.

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Introducing Anteroom

Anteroom is a small open-source proxy that runs on your own server, giving website owners control and visibility for changing traffic patterns while preserving user experience.

Anders’ site exists to be read. It's a public number, published so that viewers, machines and humans alike can reference it. Scraping isn't an offense, but his site was generating an untenable 15 gigabytes of traffic per day.

The site needed less of a wall and more of a door: something that allows intentional traffic through while smoothing spikes in volume.

How it Works

With Anteroom, a visitor to the site is offered two options for entry. The first is a lightweight proof-of-work puzzle, designed to reduce the affordability of launching thousands of requests per second.

A completed puzzle earns a pass lasting ten seconds. While the visitor reads, their browser quietly solves the next puzzle in the background, so clicks stay instant and a reader waits exactly once. This prevents cookie credentials from being passed to scraping tools that can launch requests at high volumes.

The second option is paid access. Instead of the proof-of-work puzzle, visitors can choose to pay a small configurable fee to a wallet you control. This paywall functions both as an additional spam prevention tool and as an entry point into a new monetization model for website owners. For example, AI agents executing a discrete, time-bound task on behalf of a user may choose to pay a small fee for access to specific data being housed on the site, rather than expending the compute for the puzzle.

The changing shape of internet traffic

Radius builds settlement infrastructure: payment rails for small-value, high-frequency payments that executable by machines. Our thesis is that LLMs and agentic workflows will change the shape of internet traffic, ultimately driving some portion of that traffic to pay its own way.

Understanding what portion of that traffic wants to pay and why is today’s challenge. Anteroom offers users a first-hand view into how their visitors react when presented with three options: expend compute, pay, or walk away. As site owners contend with volatile traffic, this information can inform their content management strategy.

In the coming weeks, Radius will release additional tools that provide deeper insight into how internet traffic is changing, both for providers and consumers of content, and early signals of demand for monetization.

Get Started

Check out Anteroom now.

It's open source and available for use at github.com/radiustechsystems/anteroom