- No fee
- Instant
- Blockchain agnostic
I mean for the actual settlement obviously.
Will take ages for that to become a browser extension, or embed. Too many parties make money off the current way. Similar to the health "care" ("insurance") in USA
The way that payments work through SEPA is that the merchant pulls the money from your account. Legally they require a "mandate" - this can be as little as a handwritten signature on a document.
Security is essentially provided by easy reversal and strong penalties for abuse.
It's also really hard to interface with. Afaik, I can't simply get an API token from my bank and send 2-cent transactions to pages I read if they'd publish the IBAN as part of an HTTP header or meta tag for example
I would consider myself tech savvy but I struggled immensely to run lightning without custodial risk back.
Does x402 prevent the double-spending problem?
Isn't it regressive to return to dependence on DNS for financial transactions?
https://anchorbrowser.io/blog/pay-to-win-coinbase-x402-ancho...
We are not far off from humans giving a monthly allowance to their agentic counterparts.
> API services paid per request
Given that this runs atop Payment Required, doesn’t this mean that each API request would involve an extra one or two data transfers?
> AI agents that autonomously pay for API access
Is there a reason why you wouldn’t pay ahead of time? I just understand why you couldn’t buy a few dozen/hundred/thousand dollars worth of credits, and wait until it runs low.
> Paywalls for digital content
Isn’t this crypto only? The overlap of people paying for digital content and dealing with crypto must be relatively small. Is it meant to funnel people to a payment portal, going through fiat, à la Coinbase?
> Microservices and tooling monetized via microtransactions
How is this different than the API point?
> Proxy services that aggregate and resell API capabilities
I’m not a huge backend person, but what would be the purpose of this?
aeon_ai•56m ago
With Stripe moving into the space heavily and looking to lock things up in "Stripe-land", I think having an open protocol is great.
kreetx•25m ago
aeon_ai•9m ago
This is different from an API schema of a /payments/ endpoint being segregated from the actual resource that is being paid for.
In this model, the payment is the cost of entry for the resource request itself. It's not as directly applicable to all payment scenarios, but enables a new class of transaction that is effectively pay-per-request.
It's worth noting that this protocol is primarily supported by Coinbase today -- You'd be using USDC on the Base network (Layer 2 on top of Ethereum). However, the protocol itself is opening meaning anyone can self-host the same mechanics on any network, with any token/crypto asset.