- 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.
I've often wondered whether payments providers entering the blockchain space (like Visa/Mastercard) would act as trusted intermediaries for dispute resolution. Kind of a 2-of-3 multisig to disperse the funds in escrow.
Infact you could implement exactly what you suggest in a similar way.
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. Nor do I know that my bank would be happy about a thousand tiny transactions each month
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?
Maybe you want to buy the service that is priced the lowest at the moment. Example: providers of inference services could drop their prices if they are underutilized. You could then have your system check for the best price and purchase only what is needed at the best price.
The flowchart on the back-end looks pretty involved, needing to publish transactions on the chain and get confirmations. For Bitcoin, that takes upwards of like 15 minutes depending on what block depth the receiving party cares about and stuff. Even foregoing that and just listening for conflicting transactions being broadcast for a few seconds, that's an annoying delay to open a page. Not to mention dealing with the UI to authorize a specific payment for every damn page on paywalled news websites
Transactions confirm every 2 seconds on Base, and preconfirm even faster (every 200ms); there's no lag from a peer to peer payments perspective since they settle so quickly.
Through account abstraction and spend permissions, you also don't have to wait and authorize every single payment. It's a customizable from a developer perspective depending on how they want to build out their application.
I'm by no means against Lightning, it's just got a long road of ecosystem, development and better UX ahead of it before we see general mainstream adoption. At the moment, bitcoin's killer feature is holding bitcoin. Most people don't know what Sats are. There are few bitcoin-payable apps. Few stable assets that remove volatility for every day payments like you would need with 402. Stuff like that.
That's because brain power is being corralled around entities that seek to maintain their control as toll keepers of financial transactions. They have to modernize and they must do it through centralized blockchains to maintain their control.
Now if the problem they want to solve is the case of low amount payments (they claim "no high minimum") then a percentage fee is not an issue, but a per-transaction fee can be absolutely massive. Also depending on the blockchain, you're exposed to fee volatility, which might be another issue.
Am I missing something here?
These days many transaction types onchain are completely free and subsidized because gas costs are subcent[1].
x402 functions predominantly on L2 networks like Base, where individual tx costs between agents are generally not a factor.
Not now, not in 20 years.
> "This code is reserved for future use."
> For when AT&T, Comcast, TimeWarner, et. al. have succeeded in their plan to make the interweb a toll-road. "Oh, you want your packets to go to reddit.com? That will be $0.00015/per."
Redditor had the right idea, just wrong names.
10 secs into it, Blockchain
Close tab
aeon_ai•2h 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•2h ago
aeon_ai•2h 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.
subscribed•1h ago
I support one of the similar projects in my organisation and I can't wait for golive.
Qworg•22m ago