Unchained - How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other - Ep. 948

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Thank you to our sponsors! Uniswap  Mantle For decades, the internet has worked without a native way to pay for things. Credit cards were bolted on, platforms built their own integrations, and developers had to stitch together complex payment flows to charge even a few cents for anything. But with AI agents now making requests, triggering actions, and needing to pay for data or services instantly, that old patchwork is starting to break. In this episode, Laura Shin speaks with Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering for Coinbase’s Developer Platform, and Sam Ragsdale, founder of Merit Systems, about x402, a new open standard for internet-native payments designed for the AI era. They discuss why AI has revived a decades-old idea, how x402 works under the hood, why devs say the experience is simpler than traditional payments, and how stablecoins make microtransactions economically viable. They also dive into the big debates: no chargebacks, chain-agnostic design, the shift to a foundation, and how this standard could eventually work with fiat as well. Guests: Sam Ragsdale, Founder and CEO of Merit Systems Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform Links: X402 x402scan ERC-8004: Trustless Agents Payments MCP: Bringing Wallets, Onramps, and Payments to Every Agent Google Agentic Payments Protocol + x402: Agents Can Now Actually Pay Each Other Timestamps: 🎙️ 0:00 Introduction 🌐 1:53 What x402 is—and the problem it finally solves for the internet 💳 7:06 How today’s payment rails work vs. how x402 reimagines them 🛠️ 9:06 Why Sam says the developer experience is “fundamentally better” 🔗 10:54 How x402 stays chain-agnostic 🧪 15:25 How Sam got into x402 and what x402scan enables 🚀 19:22 Some of the most interesting early use cases 🪄 23:05 How x402 works on the backend and why users shouldn’t see any of it 🏛️ 26:21 Why x402 is becoming a Foundation + the Cloudflare partnership 🔮 28:10 What the future of payments could look like in an AI-native world 💱 33:05 How x402 could also work with fiat, not just stablecoins 🆓 34:31 How the team is able to charge zero transaction fees ❓ 37:48 Whether x402 can fix the chargeback problem 🔌 42:57 Integrations: Payments MCP and Google A2A 🐶 45:28 How x402 is being used to buy memecoins, and other early apps Sam & Erik love 🤝 50:37 The challenge of reputation and trustless AI agents Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is just a problem that's existed for a long time and it's it's an idea whose time has come. AI is really the incumbent force where we should actually take this problem seriously and try to solve it. Having built on X402 quite a bit over the past month, which is that the DevX is just fundamentally better. Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, you're no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained as investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. And my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show.

For more disclosures, visit UnchainedCrypto.com. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product? The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-and-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto, all with zero hacks. It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity, less complexity. Visit hub.uniswop.org to learn more. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfai and Web3.

Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Today's topic is X402, an open protocol for internet native payments. I'm here with Eric Ripple, head of engineering a coin-based developer platform, an author of X402, and Sam Ragsdale, founder and CEO of Merritt, Welcome, Sam and Eric. Excite to be here. So a quick heads up for people. Today's episode is actually pre-recorded because Eric is in Asia at the moment.

Also, another note. This was not planned at all. But we randomly also happen to be launching as a mini app in the base app today. So if you have the base app, be sure to check out our live stream there where we have features like being able to buy featured coins and other fun stuff. Okay. So Eric and Sam. Eric and Sam, everyone is excited about agenetic commerce, of which X402 is one of the protocols enabling this. So let's start by explaining what it is and how it got started. Eric, how about you? You take it from here.

Yeah. So the internet kind of runs on standards. We have like HTTP and HTML and CSS and this enables computers to communicate with each other without a bespoke like per company way of. declaring, hey, this is how I'm going to send you data. This is how I'm going to, this is that you should render my data in your browser. But we've never actually had that for money. There's never been a standard for how do you convey the intent to move value attached to the internet or attached to a web request?

And this is a problem that's gone back to like the earliest days of the internet. Mark Injuries and spent a bunch of time on this back in the 90s. You see kind of evidence of this in the HTTP 1.1.1.2. one spec where the status code 402 was enshrined. And it's, I can, I can, I have a party trick, which is I can recite the entirety of the 402 spec. It's one line. It's reserved for future use.

And AI has really kind of forced us to reevaluate this long required, or this long unsolved problem of internet native payments. Up until now, once we had HTTP, entering your credit card kind of worked. But that doesn't really scale. for machine-to-machine payments and for AI agents to be able to pay each other. I think there's an additional interesting historical anecdote there, which is when they were building the browser, Mark Andreessen and Tim Berners-Lee, in the 90s.

They reserved the status code 402. And I think one of the reasons behind it is at the time in 1995, running a server was about two orders of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Lots of things happened in the past 30 years to bring that price down. But at the time, it was like prohibitively expensive to put something on the internet. And so when they were building the browser before ads existed, they asked themselves like, what is going to be the incentive model for the internet? Like, why would I put my server online?

And then why would I respond to you if you ask my server to do some work and to give me some resources back? And the thing that was really, really obvious to them was that you would pay for it. You know, one server would pay another server to request resources or data from it. And so they reserved that 402 status code. But at the time, micro transactions didn't exist. This was like prepaypal or it was barely credit card. on the internet. And so there is no good way for machine to machine payments to happen.

And, you know, fast forward 30 years, you know, lots of blockchain developments and now micro transactions are plausible again. And it's a good time to circle back to it. And so if it kind of was reserved for all those decades, then how is it that the, you know, X402 that we're talking about today, how did that come to be? Yeah. So I was thinking, I took some time off after leaving my last position and was thinking, about what I wanted to spend time doing. And I came to the conclusion, like, we're going to need internet native payments to really scale AI and started doing a bunch of research on all the attempts to do internet native payments

of the past. A fun fact is Brian Armstrong actually tried to do a 402 internet native payments scheme back in 2015. And when I was re-interviewing, when I was interviewing to rejoin Coinbase back in October of last year, I was talking to Brian and he asked me the question, like, what would you do if, what do you think we should be doing with CoinMus developer platform? And I said, I think one of the things we should be doing is creating a standard for these internet native payments because I think it will really lead to the mass adoption of stable coins and the proliferation of crypto across

the internet because stable coins and modern blockchains just are the best way to move money that exists on the planet right now. And it's the only real way to move. a 10th of a cent and not have the fees be like a disproportionate amount of the value transferred with traditional credit cards and traditional financial rails really 30 cents is the floor and the recipient will get zero dollars out of that because there's just a 30 cent fee attached to the transaction and so I rejoined Coinbase and then I spent a bunch of time basically taking the research I had done prior to joining Coinbase and formulating the X402 spec and the initial SDKs. And we put X402 out back in March at ETH Denver and showed it to some early

early partners and early builders, including the Salana Foundation and a bunch of folks at Heath Denver. We knew from the start X402 needed to be multi-chain and open and neutral to have any chance of getting adoption. And it's kind of grown from there. But it's a really old problem. Like I always want to make sure I make it super clear. Like this is just a problem that's existed for a long time.

And it's an idea whose time has come. AI is really the incumbent force where we should actually take this problem seriously and try to solve it. So now let's talk about the fact that I'm sure there's some percentage of people who are going to listen to this and be like, I make payments online every day. So, you know, what is the difference between what you're building with? X402 and what payments today, like generally in the mainstream, what is the difference between those two? It's a great question. This is a really subtle thing with engineering where the payment experience that you perform probably looks very similar from website to website. Like you're entering a credit card information. You're entering like the expiration, the CVV, your address. and that forum on a web page looks pretty similar in each website you go and buy something on.

But what's happening from your browser to their server actually can be completely different on every website. In fact, it is completely different on every website. The interaction and the exchange of data is just not standardized at all. And that's also true from the person accepting payment. Their integration into PSP is actually completely different depending on the vendor that they choose, like the Stripe API and the Adyenne API and the Checkout.com APIs are all completely different and require a robust integration. And so what X402 does is it makes it so that there's one thing to integrate and then you can accept payment regardless of the underlying mechanism. And why that's really

powerful for AI is AI are probabilistic systems where they're not guaranteed to fill out that form the same way every time. And there's like 12 forms in a credit card, uh, just to be able to, 12 fields in a credit card form, your agent is not going to be able to fill those out correctly every single time. But if you give it a tool, which just says, hey, you can now structurally pay the same way that you can structurally make an HTTP request and ask for the content of an API or a website, it makes it a deterministic problem rather than a probabilistic problem. I would even go a step further, having built on X402 quite a bit over the past month,

which is that the devX is just fundamentally better, the devX being. the developer experience. When you're doing checkouts with stable coins, it's much simpler either to pay somebody for something in stable coins or receive money in stable coins. One, there's just less work to integrate. Two, there's no chargebacks. Chargebacks kind of creep. So this is the any credit card transaction, any wire, any international wire can theoretically be clawed back at some level of escalating legal pressure. And with stable coins, you don't have that. So it doesn't leak into the developer experience. It's much easier to send and receive money. And so when you're when you're building one of these systems, you can much more easily integrate payments and you don't have to

create a legal relationship with a payment processor. You don't have to sign up with them. You don't have to exchange tax information, et cetera. You can just accept self-custodial money in form of stable coins or other cryptocurrency. Yeah. When I was learning about this, I was feeling like, oh, this is like cash, but digital. Is that? that how to think about it? Because like the protocol doesn't even use accounts. Totally. Yeah. The X-402 is like super lightweight, right? It's it's just a way to declare payments. It doesn't take custody of funds. It doesn't it's not in flow of funds. It isn't actually even prescribing a like mechanism of payment. It just says like, hey, here's a common pattern to say

here's how to give me money and then clear instructions for the customer on how to make that payment. And so cash is like, I think stablecoins broadly just are like the closest digital analog that we have to cash. Yeah. Yeah. But so this was something that I was wondering, because it's like chain agnostic, are you in the background adding all these different chains constantly or like how does it make it chain agnostic? I don't understand how that even works. So it comes down to the category of chain. And so what X402 does is that special. specifies the mechanism that a chain should utilize to move funds and a set of principles that should be adhered to per chain. And so for any EVM chain, it works exactly the same way from a technical standpoint.

And so whether it's polygon or base or Ethereum L1 or Avalanche C chain, they all use the exact same mechanism to move funds. And then similar for SVM chains, X-402 basically enshrines like a canonical way to move money. per chain and then both the client and the server understand, hey, we're making doing a transaction on base. Okay, we're going to use EIP 309 for a gasless transfer. And that allows like consensus because it's actually like there's a. The amazing thing about crypto, but also the thing about that makes crypto payments complex is that there's actually a lot of ways to transfer tokens in crypto,

at least from an engineering standpoint. And they all result in the same thing of you know me sending a dollar to you. But the way you code it up, the way that you actually build against it has like a huge, there's many different options. And so X402 basically prescribed, hey, this is the way to do it. This is like how to form the connective tissue for payment across each chain. Okay, wait. So is it almost like the chains have to add it in a way? Like if it requires an EIP for any EVM chain, then it's like a, what is it, a SIMD or whatever on salon? Like, is that how that works?

Oh, okay, now I get it. It doesn't actually require a bespoke like integration per chain. It's each chain kind of decides like, hey, here's the best way to move money on our chain, given these goals. And the goals are like high UX, don't require gas, don't make it so that there's no like flow of funds or custody, make it so that the client can only, is only moving funds that they've authorized to move and there's no risk of them moving funds that they haven't authorized to move. And given those like requirements, I work with each foundation basically to enshrine like this is

the best way to accomplish those goals using the mechanisms already available on our blockchain. I have historically analogized it to ERC20. I think that is quite a helpful mental model for what a standard is by creating a standard for what represents a token or transferable fungible token on a given chain, you kind of create a network effect around integrations. Any decks or any defy protocol or any payment processor that accepts ERC20, they benefit from everybody else accepting ERC20 because then there's not multiple forms of ways to collect money. And everybody can hold ERC20 in their wallets. They can put ERC20 into their dexes.

They can put it into their lending protocols. They can pay for NFTs with it, et cetera. but it doesn't necessarily require deploying any code to make the RC20 standard. You just make a standard way for people to transmit value on a given chain. And then Solana has the SPL tokens as well. And I would say that X402 is very similar there. It's just a means that every merchant and every buyer can say, I would like to integrate with X402.

I would like to access X402 resources. And they all benefit from everybody else agreeing to use a single standard. Okay. But it does require like a decision by each blockchain community in a way to adopt that standard. Okay. Totally. This is kind of the difference between a standard and a protocol, in my opinion, where a standard is actually just social convention and kind of like an agreement amongst parties to do something in a certain way. Whereas a protocol involves deploying new code to the blockchain and saying, oh, we're going to all use the smart contract. standard is really just an organizing principle and an agreement from people to do a thing in a certain way. But you can't actually enforce it.

It's just that if you don't follow the standard, you lose the network effects and the ecosystem compatibility and the social convention and things just break if you don't follow those standards. Okay. Okay. Before we keep going into how it works and all that, let's get Sam's backstory because we talked about how Eric came to be working on this. So Sam, tell us how you came to be working, you know, working. as a developer using X402. Yeah. So I'm CEO of a company called Merit Systems. We've been around for about a year.

Our goal is to help developers monetize their code on the internet. We have a product called Terminal that is like a bank account for every GitHub repo, runs on base, uses stable coins under the hood. And then we've been launching tools to help people monetize directly out of those instances. So we launched an AI product that runs larger on credit cards today. And then we launched a bunch of X402 products. And when we entered the X402 ecosystem in around September,

there were some ecosystem-wide things that we thought we could spruce up and help fix, which one was discoverability. It was quite hard to find the resources. And then once you found them, it was quite hard to call them as well. The way that people were doing it at the time was that people would have fully integrated web apps where they had a client and a server. This is just a normal website to most people. This is what we're familiar with from Defi.

Most of the time when you call uniswap, you do it through the uniswop front end. When you call curve, you do it through the curve front end, et cetera. And I think X402, the dream of it is sort of multi-client, multi-server, where you have many different ways, many different front-ends for calling the same resource. In fact, you can compose them together. And so that was the second thing we thought we might be able to help with and fix. And then the third was helping with composability in the ecosystem. The dream is sort of you could have a bunch of different servers that offer different

resources. You can use an AI agent on top of it to compose like a single end request. And so I think I don't want to steal this one from you, Eric, but an example Eric likes to use is the, I would like to plan a vacation. You know, I want to go to Canada for the winter to go skiing. And I need to, you know, get some flights. I need to get a hotel. I maybe need some restaurant recommendations. And then I need to rent some skis as well. And all of those would be different providers, but an agent theoretically, we'd be able to chain all of the requests together. And so far in the ecosystem as of September, it was quite hard to do that. There wasn't really a canonical interface for doing it.

And there was like some technical difficulties around doing it. And so we put our heads together, the seven of us, and came up with X402 scan. You can find it at X402 scan.com. It's simultaneously a discovery layer that gives you great analytics over the X402 ecosystem. You can understand who is. transacting, what merchants are accepting money in what currencies, on what chains. And then I think more excitingly, you can then also call all of those resources. So it's like kind of like a browser for the X402 ecosystem, which allows you to see all of

the X402 resources and directly in line, you can go and you can fetch those resources. And then I think about a week and a half after launch, we launched Composer to fix the last, or to try to fix the last leg of this, which is sort of chat GPT. except with an embedded wallet that allows you to call all of the resources, which really helps developers when they're thinking about what resources to build, they can build for Composer and then future clients that look like Composer and build resources that compose nicely and have kind of a shape that makes sense to work with an AI agent. Okay, and that last bit is sort of like a front end?

Is that how to think about it? Yeah, exactly. Okay, yeah, rather than... I think the analog you should think of, for X402 scan and why it's named this way is because if it's like ether scan, which we're very familiar with from Defi, the bit that we've added on top of it

is sort of like Composer, which is an AI agent that can also call all of the resources available on X402. Okay, okay, this is so interesting. So, you know, what you just described is kind of like from the developer side. So now let's like completely flip over to a different angle, which is so let's, let's, Let's project at some point in the future when X402 is widely used.

I'd love to hear you kind of walk me through from like a customer or everyday person's perspective. What would a transaction look like that would be using X402 in the background that, like, they might not even know that that's what's going on? I think the bit you hit there is exactly right, Laura, which is they may not even know it's going on. I think X402 success cases that people don't think about. X402 at all.

Like people don't think about HTTP. Normal people don't think about HTTP on a daily basis. But what it enables you to do is like this narrative of agentic commerce actually becoming like a real thing where your agent, your chat interface may be doing like hundreds of small transactions in the background to make it better at performing tasks for you without you even realizing. And so let's let's take Sam's booking a. up to Canada example, you may want to, you may only want to go to Alberta when there's like

fresh snow, right? And so your AI agent may pay like a 10 cents to get like a super accurate weather forecast of when in the next month is it most likely to be fresh powder in Alberta and then recommend, hey, you should go on these dates based on the weather forecast and this kind of like 10 cent purchase for access to better data to make decisions for you that can happen in the background. is like net new and net novel because you can make these small transactions with stable coins. And so in theory, like as a consumer, your agent just gets better at serving you. And your agent now has like a budget that you give it to enable it to perform these tasks better on your behalf. That's so interesting. Keep going, Sam.

Yeah, I think another example I like is a lot of the news companies are struggling right now with the decline of advertising. revenue and people's lack of interest in paying for news maybe. And so one of the models people are thinking about is usage-based pricing. You have a paywall in front of each article and maybe you pay a dollar per article rather than paying $5 a month. And you could imagine waking up in the morning and saying, I want to pay $5 for my custom newspaper. And then your agent goes and goes through the 50 different news sites, picks headers that it

wants to buy. It buys the top five that you're most interested in based on your personnel. and then it makes sort of a perfect news briefing for you in the morning while you're brushing your teeth. Wow. And it creates a new revenue stream for all these news sites, right? Where instead of them getting scraped by the chat agents and getting disintermediated from their users without having a clear path of monetization, now they're getting paid 50 cents for the agent to take those articles and present them to the human. And you're getting like a higher quality news experience for paying like a dollar to,

get that like aggregation from your chat interface. Okay, you guys, this is hilarious. I don't know if you specifically pick that example because I have been quite vocal about how I think the media business models are broken and that I am very interested in crypto ways that that can be fixed. So I love that and I'm like, oh, maybe we can, maybe we can add this to our site. So, okay, so you just, we just described how this might look in the future once this is adopted from the users. angle. So then on the back end, is it what you were talking about where the agent. So, okay,

but in this world, I guess, like all of these different, like, company or like, yeah, stores, like whatever businesses are offering these services that the agents are using, they will have to accept it and adopt it, right? So what does that look like? Are you trying to do similar things to the, you know, Coinbase deal with Shopify? you know, to accept stable coin payments on base? Like is like, do you have to go to merchants to get them to adopt it? Or how does that part happen? One of the nice things about it being an open standard is that, you know,

CDP is more than happy to help people adopt stable coins. And we have great tools that make it easier to accept stable coins. But it works with any piece of program, CDP or a coinbase developer platform. Platform, right. Yeah, yeah. We're still working on brand awareness. We have great tools, but you don't have to use our tools to do it. Right.

If you have a wallet to accept stable coins, too, you can get started with X402 incredibly easily. As Sam alluded to, me and my team have spent a huge amount of time trying to make the developer experience really amazing for X402. And so we typically see companies being able to add X402 to support to their APIs or to their websites and under an hour. And it's really as simple as one line of code and then having a wallet that you can set to accept stable coins. Or you could, you know, if you're a business, you can open a Coinbase business account and then accept stable coins to your Coinbase business account and then send off to your bank account via CoinBiz. But it really is like because there's a standard way of doing it, you can create really robust libraries that make it trivial to do.

And there's like one way to do it. And that's the power of standards is that it kind of removes all the questions. and just tells you, here's how you should do stable coin acceptance if you want to use the X402 standard. Everyone's abstracted it away from you. The tooling is really good. Everyone's using the same conventions. People know how to buy from you and they don't have to figure out how to pay you every time.

It's all just, there's one way to do it. There's a convention on how to perform that payment. And I would add two things there, which is one, that it's definitely easier to integrate X402 than it is to integrate, like, checkout with Western Union or something like. like that. Accepting stable coins is really easy. You add an address and then like add a new API route. It's quite simple. And then two is that you don't need to ask anybody's permission to accept checkout next 402. Like this is a thing that's fundamentally better about crypto than the existing payment rails is that every other way of accepting digital or virtual currency via

credit card or wire or ACHRTP whatever, you always ask somebody's permission. You know, you go and you sign a legal agreement and then you, you know, they can kick you off at any time. You have to abide by their terms of service, all of that stuff, which some of that might be good. But it is fundamentally better if you have self-custodial money, that you can just sign up yourself. You can be this long tail. You can accept payments for anything. You don't have to ask anybody's permission to get paid. And one other thing that I was just thinking about, you know, you described it as the standard.

and it's just a way for everyone to agree on how this should be handled. But I was wondering, are there competing standards as well? Because crypto, it's not new. So are there other people that are saying, hey, actually, we think this way of doing it is better. And so is there competition? I think within the crypto ecosystem, there's been a few people who have kind of like forked, but actually most of them have come back to X402 as a standard.

I think a lot of the reason for people forking, especially in the early days, was thinking that Coinbase was going to turn this into a base only thing or a Coinbase specific thing. But we really genuinely want this to be a open, neutral standard that isn't like governed or controlled by Coinbase-Uilaterally, which is why we're actually moving X-4-2 into a foundation. And so it'll be governed in a similar fashion to how all like open-eastern. standards or programming languages are governed where multiple companies can come together and collaborate and there's no like unilateral control by one entity and so we announced a couple months ago that Coinbase and Cloudflare will be the two member coinbase and Cloudflare will be the two founding members of the X402 foundation but there'll be plenty more and Cloudflare will be using X402 to allow their customers to accept pay per crawl you so

anyone who's hosting website on Cloudflare will be able to use X-402 and accept payment if an agent is trying to access their content. And so the kind of integration becomes like one-click in theory if you use Cloudflare as your host. Okay. Oh, super interesting. All right. So one other thing that I wondered is, so as we talked about, we have these existing payments on the Internet that most people think, you know, work okay. and then now we have this new standard happening. So in the future, do you think that it'll be kind of like snail mail and email where they coexist? And if so, then how do you think the payments landscape will change? Like which types of transactions do you expect will be done with this kind of technology versus which ones will just remain sort of the ones that we've had so far?

So there's this category of agent. commerce. It's kind of like who knows what it means at this point. I'll give you a definition that I like to use because I think it's a good reference point is agentic commerce is like any purchase initiated by an LLM and those fall into two categories. One is conversational commerce where the human is like very much in the loop and you know, your AI agent, your chat GPT is doing research for you and then at the end saying like, hey, these are the shoes that you should buy and you just click yes. And then there's this autonomous commerce, which is more the example of purchasing data or APIs or tools that make the agent more effective at its job. The example being paying for a weather forecast for Alberta to know when you should go skiing.

And X402 is better for both, but it's orders of magnitude better for autonomous payments because these autonomous payments are going to be much smaller in size and stable coins are just much better suited to handle small. frequent transactions compared to existing rails. But the advantage of accepting X4-02 is it can do both. Like you can transfer a tenth of a cent with X-402 or you can transfer a billion dollars. And what I think we're going to see is as consumers start to have more access to stable coins and as the friction to add stable coins to these interfaces that humans have increases, we'll see like a shift where in the start it's largely autonomous commerce that uses X-402. X402 and over time it's all commerce that can use X402.

Okay. I think it's always worth calling that as well. There's nothing about X402 that makes it crypto only. And so you absolutely, you actually could do Fiat transactions using the X402 standard. And I suspect we will have that. And I suspect a really common pattern you'll see is stable coins and X402 used for the small information and that equivalent of the pay for data example. And then credit cards being used for the large.

oh, I'm booking the flight now. And so I want some consumer protections and I want the, I want to put it on credit rather than having to actually have the funds available to purchase that. And both those transactions are expressed via X4 or two, but the payment network actually depends on the what is more optimal for the type of purchase. Okay. So I want to ask more about that. But first, we are going to take a quick word from the Sponsuit to make the show possible. Hey, founders and developers. If you're looking to bring on-chain trading to your product, wallet, or platform, check out the new Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs. It's your plug-and-play gateway to global on-chain liquidity,

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Visit hub.uniswop.org to learn more. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking as the next frontier. UR is the access layer that transforms Mantle network into a purpose-built vertical platform, the blockchain for banking that enables financial services on-chain. UR unifies and vertically, Mantles focus on payments, trading, and assets, MI4, METH protocol, functions of BTC, supported by developer grants, ecosystem incentives,

and the industry-leading distribution platform through the UR app, Reward Station, and By-Bit launch pool. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to token holders and establish its significance in blockchain for banking. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Back to my conversation with Sam and Eric. So I just wanted to ask a little bit more about what you said, where you've said that you felt the standard could be used to move fiat money, like you mean like literal analog

money in bank accounts that, you know, could get lost in wires and like, what does that mean? Yeah, there's nothing about X402 that makes it, that would prohibit you from using ACH or SEPA or a wire or a transaction on the Visa network or MasterCard network. Again, X402 is really just an enshrined set of agreed upon practices on how to initiate those things. And so you could absolutely use X-402 to convey wire instructions. Wire might be a little tricky because usually they have to call someone. But ACH, right? You could easily integrate ACH. In fact, back in, I think, April, a former Stripe employee who now I'm blanking on the company who works on now, but he's found X-402 and actually integrated Stripe's API into X-402 and let you do X-402 transactions on

Stripe. This was kind of like a non-sanctions kind of like hack, wasn't officially endorsed by stripe, but it just worked and he was able to do it because ultimately it's just conventions on how to perform the payment versus like actually dictating anything about what the payment does. Okay. This is super interesting. So one other thing that I didn't understand is, as we mentioned before, it has zero fees for either the customer or the merchant. Like we're so used to blockchains charging for transactions. So I don't understand how that can be. This is like a really, this is a really great point.

So the protocol or the standard itself does it to infringe in a fee. It doesn't say like, hey, you must pay this person this amount, in part because there's no way to enforce that. Like you could just simply opt not to. There may be fees that are associated depending on the underlying

network. Like if the network is striped, there's going to be fees associated with stripe that come into play. And there may be gas that's involved in the chain. And so the the merchant may need to pay gas or may need to have a relationship with what's called a facilitator in the X402 spec, which is, think of a facilitator as just a way to abstract away the complexities of crypto from people who are new to crypto. And they may charge like some gas plus like a small premium in order to transact.

But there's no percentage based fee. There's no fixed like minimum fee that's actually encapsulated in the standard. It's we kind of leave the economics to be determined by either the relationship between the merchant and the facilitator or the merchant can just go directly to the chain and implement the X-402 standard themselves and interact directly with the blockchain. And that means that their costs are just the gas of whichever networks they choose to accept payments on. Oh, so it doesn't remove gas. No, no. There's an abstraction for gas. And right now, all the facilitators are kind of just eating the cost of gas.

But unfortunately, I haven't managed to just make gas go away. It exists. There's no additional fees compared to the fees of gas. And the great thing about that is as chains continue to get more and more efficient and cheaper and cheaper, you're just paying the root costs of the transfer. There's no additional fees on top of the fees of the blockchain. And we've seen the price to, the gas cost to transfer. transfer USC has gone from like $10 in 2020 to a hundredth of a cent typically in 2020,

2020, or 2026 now, 25. And most of the chains are, most of the chains are the foundations or somebody related to the chain is subsidizing all of the gas costs associated with X402 today. Hard to say how long that will go on, but that means that four people. transacting either merchants or consumers, it is actually, you know, gas free or gas cost free to do X4 or two transactions today. Yeah, you know what's really interesting? I just realized this would be the kind of thing where merchants would be very incentivized

to adopt it. But at least in the U.S., probably other jurisdictions are a little bit different. But in the U.S., where people get perks on their credit cards, they might be less interested. So it's going to be like a weird little push and pull for some period. But actually, I did want to ask earlier because you also mentioned this, you know, that like that chargebackstone exists with this. So, you know, if I do buy something and then I realize like, oh, it doesn't fit or I don't like it or, you know, whatever, then how, you know, how does it get handled? So at some point, we're going to need to handle the charge rack problem. one of the things, but I think right now we're just trying to create convention on how to perform the equivalent of me handing you $1.

Where if I hand you a dollar and you walk away and I don't know you, like I have no way of getting that dollar back. And so eventually we're going to need to create more complex forms of commerce where there's this concept of chargebacks and reputation and disintermediation. And, but those are like very difficult problems that we need to progressively build up to. And I think the place to start is this like $1 concept, right, where I'm handing you 20 cents to call your API. X402 kind of foresees this problem and has this concept of a scheme encoded in the spec. And the scheme is, you can think of it as the logical way of moving money. And so the first scheme that we launched is called exact. which just says, I'm paying you exactly $1.

But you can imagine a scheme that has the logic of a chargeback. And then there's some intermediary that acts as like the determinant of like, can this be charged back or not? Or there's like some policy where the client can file a complaint and affect the reputation and pull money back at a future time. And that may be like a new scheme. But there's so much complexity that goes into that. And especially when you have.

have like automated movement of funds, like what would prevent a client from always asking for their funds back, right? Chargebacks are like a human process right now. But if you automatically could just say like, oh, give me my money back, an AI could just purchase from you and then take the money back right away. And so you have kind of the opposite problem as well. So I've been having the chargeback argument for many years now with people around stable coins, which is that I think it's fundamentally better to have a system that does not have chargebacks. think it's something that we've grandfathered in since like, you know, the early credit card days when credit cards were processed by fax. I actually think you totally can have an economy that

works without chargebacks, which is that you go to the merchant, you know, you hand them your $10 in cash and you buy your jacket. And then you come back with your jacket and you say, this is a bad jacket. I would like my $10 back. And if they don't give you your $10 back, then, you know, they're a bad merchant and you'll go and tell everybody they're a horrible merchant and you shouldn't use them. And then people will stop buying from them. And so I think you can actually just have an economy that runs on merchant reputation that does not have like credit card companies able to do the clawback at the level of the transaction. Like I don't think it belongs in the money protocol at all. Interesting. Huh. But okay, but I guess like, yeah, if the merchant refuses, then the customer just

to screwed and I mean, maybe it's like, you know, not $10, maybe it's like $500 or, you know, $1,000 or whatever. So I think you could have consumer protections like you do now, right? Like the government could be in charge of making sure that, you know, in the case that the shop says this is a refundable purchase and you will be able to get your money back if you don't want it in 30 days. And that's sort of part of their legal agreement around buying. Then if they don't give you your, you know, a.

thousand dollars back when you return the jacket you can go to the government or you can sue them you can take them to court and they can give give money back and then that's enough of an incentive that that will almost never happen like i i don't know how that obligation moved to the credit card companies but it never really made sense to me huh okay i think too in in your example laura this is where being able to use multiple payment networks and multiple ways of making a payment and co-mingling them is really valuable. And so with X-402, you can actually say, there's multiple ways to pay me.

You can pay me with USCC on base or USCTT on Solana. And in future, maybe you can say, oh, I also accept visa payment. And you may as a consumer choose, like, oh, this is like a $500 purchase. So I actually want to pay a bit of a premium to put this on my visa

so that I can do a charge back in the future if I need to. Or there might be a bit of a discount if you're just paying with USC, because there's no like visa network fee associated with it. So maybe things are just 3% cheaper if you're paying a stable coins versus visa. And so you can actually commingle these

where like if you're making a 10 cent purchase, are you super concerned about charging it back? I'd probably agree with Sam in that case. But if you're making a $500 purchase, you may want to pay a little bit more to have those protections and have that like arbiter of was the service delivered who you can go and complain to and potentially get a charge back for us.

Okay, okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right. So let's now talk about some of the other, I don't, yeah, I think some of these are protocols or just like integrations or something. So one of them is payments MCP. Another one that I saw being talked about was the Google A2A agent to agent protocol. You know, talk a little bit about both of those and how X402 works with those. Yeah. So payments MCP is. is a product that Coinbase created that gives any MCP compatible chat interface, such as Cloud, access to an embedded wallet, access to the discovery layer of X402. So it can find different services that are available on X402, and then the ability to pay for these services. And so you run like, you install payments MCP and now Claude can go and purchase anything that's available in the X-4-2 ecosystem on your behalf. And you can give Cloud, like, a dedicated wallet.

You can control, spend permissions on the wallet. You can create, like, very sophisticated guardrails for your aid, AI to purchase. Because money is, like, fully programmable, you can create UX, user experiences that are, like, extremely safe by just saying, hey, you're not allowed to spend more than a dollar. And that's, like, enforced in code in the client. And what that lets Cloud do is it's this more powerful AI thing that we've been talking about, where now Cloud can actually pay to access data that's behind resources or behind paywalls for me or pay to use tools that it doesn't actually have access to.

And there's this kind of gloat this dynamic ecosystem of anything that accepts X402 is now available to use versus me having to go in and manually integrate one MCP tool at a time. And then A-to-A is a collaboration we did with Google where A to A is a standard for agent to agent communication. And so it's a very full-stack way for agents to communicate with each other. And we worked with Google to create a native integration to A-to-A that allows those agents to then pay each other using X402. And for all the same reasons, stable coins are great for small payments. Agents are also great for agents paying each other because typically an agent's not going to need to pay another agent like $1,000.

it's usually like sub-dollar transactions. Okay. All right. Super interesting. So now let's talk about apps because I'm sure there's a lot of things being built on this and a lot of things maybe that already are being built or have been built that are exciting to you. So what are some of your favorite apps that either already exist or that you're seeing being built? Yeah. So we look at a lot of this data. I think a lot of the resources vast majority are listed on X402 scan. So I pour over this all the time. I think it is important to note.

So there's about, we've done about in the past month, about $13 million of volume transacted across base in Solana in USC, which is the vast majority of it. And about 20 million transactions now. So numbers are definitely up into the right. The vast majority of those are meme coins, which is slowly dying off. But there is a long tale of builders that have come in that are building non-speculative resources, resources that are. informational. So just sorry, because of the way that we were talking about, like, how it's being used. So how are people using X402 with meme coins? Like, what are they doing with those? It is not particularly sophisticated. They put up a resource that is slash mint, and then it

gives them meme coins, which I will note is not a particularly good way to mint a meme coin. You would prefer to do it through a smart contract. But it is important to note because if you go on X402 scan, which is a great way to explore the. resources, you'll see the top 10 by volume are meme coin. So I wanted to call that out very explicitly. It's basically you're thrown up an API and what that API does is sends you a meme coin. Okay.

So, okay. So it's just like people are basically having fun with it, I guess. Yes. Exactly. People in crypto are doing what people in crypto do, which is launch meme coins, mess around. But I think to Sam's point is what was been really gratifying for me to see is it's so much attention to X-402 and brought in this whole new class of builders that are building higher utility more, in my opinion, interesting use cases that I think are going to be much higher traction.

But they take more time to build because they tend to be more sophisticated and, you know, doing more complex things than just sending you a meme coin. Yeah. We've seen about a hundred, depending on the day, between 100 and 1,000 new resources a day. And I would say like at this point, under 20% of those are meme coins. So the The vast majority of new resources are non-mecoin related, despite the fact that most of the usage by volume is meme coins. I think the ones that are most interesting that people are building today, there's a lot of like these crypto search ones.

So AIXBT, for example, which is big on Twitter, they have a vector search of all of crypto Twitter. So they've scraped all of crypto Twitter and then you can search against that. That data is typically very hard to access. A bunch of people have done that for token pricing. People have done that for crypto news. And so I think that's particularly interesting. Some people have done the Twitter API.

There is all of the AI resources are available. So your top model providers. So OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc. You can access OverX402. Same for the generative AI ones. So the image gen, image editing, and then video gen as well. And then increasingly recently, which I'm excited about, there's a lot of the open source custom models that people have fine tuned for

a lot of the Chinese quen models that people fine-tuned for making a face or making an action movie or something like that, which I think is particularly cool because it would be very hard to access those otherwise. You'd need very expensive GPU resources and for people to be able to spend 10 cents to get a quen generation rather than spend two weeks getting an H-100 on Amazon web services. I think it's pretty cool and we're excited about it. What I'd add is the thing that's really powerful about X-4-2 is that you don't need to create a direct relationship with every single buyer. You don't need to go and get an API key. And so you get really good composability of the different resources.

And so instead of traditionally, I'd have to go and sign up for an API key to do image generation and then sign up for an API key to, to get access to some data API because they're all different products. And that's like really gnarly and hard to do. but you start to be able to chain these calls together and create these like workflows that are dynamic and these agents that are much more dynamic in their capabilities than traditional AI agents. And so I'll tell you my favorite one, which is there's someone created a API where you send it an image and an address and $20 and it mails you a T-shirt.

And so what you could do is you can pay to search for the latest news that's happened for the day and then pay to have an LLM summarize that news and a prompt and then pay for an image to be generated for that the day's news and then pay for a t-shirt that represents the day's news to be shipped to your address. And this just all can be composed together and you don't have to like sign up. In theory, you could do all of that from like one chat interface without ever leaving the chat interface. That's really cool. It's called shirt.sh tried out today. Okay. I love it. So I have to, so I know Eric has to run in a couple minutes, but before he goes, I have to ask about one thing, which somebody alluded to briefly.

As we know, when the bots get released on the internet, there can be a lot of kind of spammy and scammy activities that happen. So, you know, is there a way to kind of figure out, like, what, like, just if you're interacting with an agent, whether or not it's one of those or how to prevent that type of behavior? Yeah. What you're talking about is reputation and discovery. And there's a EIP that was put up by the Ethereum Foundation's AI division called EIP 804 that I'm a co-signer of. I think 804 is like a great launching place to start thinking about these problems. But these are really hard problems. Like I don't think X402 solves every problem, right?

And it doesn't try to. It tries to solve one problem quite well. But to get to like a fully agentic internet, we're going to need multiple standards. And we just understand basically people just leave reviews of different. agents that they've interacted with. Is that how that works? Correct. Yeah, it's kind of, you can think of it as like Yelp for services and AI agents.

And, but you're going to need these concepts of reputation to create like a robust agent economy. It's just that I think that reputation is less obvious how to solve than payments are. And so as the space evolves, we're going to have more and more standards that kind of can get combined to create a robust ecosystem. The analogy I make a lot is like the internet wasn't super useful and it was just HTTP. We needed HTTP and HTML and CSS and JavaScript in order to create the like experience that we have today. But each one of those is kind of like an independent thing that needs to be built up.

And so it's it's an absolute, I think absolutely like we just need to start experimenting and pushing the ball forward. And we're super early on all of this stuff. And so I think movement and just trying stuff is the key right now. And then to add on to your analogy, HTTP, HTML, CSS, and then search and notably page rank so that you can surface the stuff that's actually good and high reputation and people can access it and be certain they'll get the services they asked for. Okay, great. Well, you guys, this was so fun. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed learning all about X-402 and getting a glimpse of our.

agentic commerce future. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's been a blast. Thanks. Welcome to this week's news recap. Let's begin. Uniswap proposes, fee switch, an $800 million token burn in major overhaul. Uniswap leaders have unveiled a sweeping proposal that would activate long-discussed protocol fees and introduce a large-scale unitoken, burn. The plan would route a share of swap fees into a, quote, token jar, allowing

users to burn Uni and withdraw an equivalent amount of crypto, reducing supply while tying the token more closely to the Protocol's revenue. The proposal also calls for retroactively burning nearly 100 million uni, worth about $800 million, representing fees that would have been captured had this mechanism existed since launch. It is backed by Uniswap Labs, the Uniswap Foundation, and founder Hayden Adams. Quote, Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in Uniswap governance. That ends today, Adams wrote. If approved, the foundation would eventually wind down, with most responsibilities shifting to Uniswap Labs. Additional features include M-EV discount auctions, quote, aggregator hooks for V4, and an end to labs front-end interface fees.

Coinbase reopens U.S. retail access to token sales with new launch platform. Coinbase has introduced a public token sales platform that will allow everyday investors worldwide, including those in the U.S. to join token launches for the first time since the 2018 ICO crackdown, the first sale will feature Monad's M-O-1 token from November 17th to November 22nd, ahead of the project's main net release on November 24th. Quote, token launches needed a change. So we built it, the exchange said, emphasizing a design meant to avoid first-come dynamics. Coinbase is using a quote, filling up from the bottom, end quote.

allocation model to broaden distribution and limit concentration among large buyers. Users who rapidly sell their tokens may see reduced allocations in future launches. Coinbase requires issuers to provide detailed project disclosures and enforces a six-month lockup on token sales by teams and affiliates. The platform follows last month's $375 million acquisition of Echo, though Coinbase said the new marketplace operates separately. The company expects to host about one sale per month with purchases made in U.S.D.C. Senate Agriculture Committee releases draft crypto market structure bill.

The Senate Agriculture Committee has published a draft of its digital asset market structure bill, marking a key step toward the Senate's version of the House-passed Clarity Act. The text, led by Chair John Boosman and Senator Cory Booker, outlines how the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would oversee spot crypto markets and where its authority would intersect with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The draft defines core terms such as, quote, blockchain, end quote, directs the CFTC and SEC to issue joint rules and classifies major assets like Bitcoin and Ether as, quote,

digital commodities. Several sections remain bracketed, signaling unresolved questions, including how to address decentralized finance. Committee staff worked through the weekend to finalize the draft even as Congress negotiated to end the government shutdown. The legislation faces a long path. It must be reconciled with the Senate Banking Committee's own draft before either panel can advance a final bill.

Industry groups said the document offers the clearest view yet of the regulatory framework taking shape. On Unchained's new show, Dex in the City, Crypto-Loyer V. Lee said she doesn't expect a market structure bill to pass until 2027. Hyperliquid activates Emergency Lock. After Popcat trades trigger a vault loss, hyperliquid briefly paused. Arbitrum-based deposits and withdrawals on Wednesday, after a trader's leveraged positions in the Popcat meme coin, triggered significant losses for the exchange's community-owned vault.

The platform's Arbitrum Bridge activated its quote, emergency lock function as the issue unfolded, according to on-chain data. A series of trades tied to an individual who split $3 million across 19 wallets resulted in more than $20 million in long Popcat positions. Those accounts were later liquidated as the tokens price fell, leaving the vault with nearly $5 million in losses. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham described the activity as, quote, passing $5 million of bad debt, end quote,

to Hyperliquid's liquidity provider. Hyperliquid halted transfers to manually close the position, a step developer Ilyansink said was necessary, while the team confirmed system stability. Quote, the Arbitrum Bridge's automatic locking was triggered by a conservative set of conditions, and the bridge was unlocked after the situation was thoroughly investigated within around 25 minutes, they said on Discord. Normal withdrawals resumed soon after, and Hyperliquid said the blockchain itself remained unaffected.

Arrow Platform aims to merge. Two major dexes into one cross-chain hub. The team behind Aerodrome on base and Velodrome on optimism is preparing to merge both exchanges into a single platform called Arrow. The project comes from the group now formally identified as Dromas Labs, the developer overseeing both Dexes, which together handle hundreds of millions in liquidity across the EVM ecosystem. Arrow is designed as a central liquidity hub that will first expand to Ethereum Mainnet and circles Archchain.

Quote, AeroDrome has been successful on base and is excited to expand to effectively service other Ethereum networks via Aero. CEO Alexander Cutler said. Executive Director Luis de la Sherda added that Arrow's unified token will, quote, serve as a claim on the productive capacity of the platform. The launch is paired with Medadex 03, an upgraded operating system that introduces slipstream V3 for capturing MEV-related value and meta-swaps for cross-chain trades,

CFO Dan Wick said the new architecture could lift revenues by 40% while cutting costs by $34 million. Circle Waze, new token for ARC network as Q3 results beat expectations. Circle, the issuer of the 73.7 billion USDC stablecoin, said it is, quote, exploring the possibility, end quote, of launching a new token tied to ARC, its stablecoin focused layer one blockchain. The company said the asset would help, quote, align the interests of ARC stakeholders, end quote, as adoption grows. ARC debuted in August and opened its public test net in October, drawing more than 100 participants, including BlackRock, Amazon Web Services, and Standard Chartered. The potential token would support Circle's push to bring more programmable finance on-chain.

The announcement came alongside strong third-quarter earnings. Circle reported $740 million in total revenue and reserve income, up 66% from last year, and $214 million in net income. USDA circulation rose 108% year over year as reserve income climbed to $711 million. Quote, We made huge progress delivering platforms for the world's leading startups and financial firms, CEO Jeremy Aller said, noting accelerating demand for USDA across payments and market infrastructure. Polymarket quietly re-enters U.S. market with beta rollout.

Polymarket has begun live testing its U.S. exchange, marking its first, steps back into the American market since resolving regulatory issues three years ago. Founder Shane Copland said the platform is, quote, actually live and operational, end quote, with select users already onboarding and placing real trades as part of a controlled beta. The relaunch follows polymarkets move offshore and a $1.4 million penalty paid to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022. With investigations from both the CFTC and the Justice Department now closed, the company acquired Q-CX, a CFTC authorized exchange and clearinghouse, allowing it to operate legally in the U.S.

Quote, it's the fastest anyone has ever gotten to market, Copland said at a conference in Miami. Polymarket also announced a new partnership with Yahoo Finance, which will integrate its probability data into a dedicated prediction markets hub, launching in the coming months. The predictions platform teamed up with Fantasy Sports app, PrizePix, to let users buy event-based contracts, combining prediction markets with fantasy gaming to reach new U.S. states and attract more players. China alleges U.S. seized $13 billion in Bitcoin, linked to 2020 Mining Pool hack. China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center is reportedly accusing the U.S. government of taking possession of 127,000 Bitcoin originally stolen from the Lubean mining

pool in 2020. The stash, worth about $13 billion, was tied at the time, to Chenji, Chairman of Cambodia's Prince Group, who now faces U.S. charges for alleged crypto fraud. In a technical report summarized by the state-owned Global Times, C-V-E-R-C, said the 2020 intrusion appeared to involve a, quote, state-level hacking organization. End quote, the coins sat dormant for nearly four years before being transferred in mid-20204 to wallets later identified by Arkham as belonging to the U.S. government. C-V-E-R-C argues the seizure may have been part of a longer operation involving the same attackers. The U.S. Department of Justice disputes that account.

Maintaining the Bitcoin was lawfully confiscated as criminal proceeds. Blockchain analysis firm Elyptic noted in a recent report that, quote, it remains unclear how the funds ultimately entered U.S. custody. Coinbase walks away from $2 billion bid for stablecoin. Firm BVNK. Coinbase confirmed it is no longer pursuing its planned acquisition of BVNK, a UK-based stablecoin infrastructure startup, ending what had been one of the sector's largest prospective deals. Quote, after discussing a potential acquisition of BVNK, both parties mutually agreed to not move forward,

a Coinbase spokesperson told Fortune. Talks had advanced into due diligence and an exclusivity period in October, according to reports, with a transaction valued at roughly $2 billion. Coinbase Ventures is already an investor in BVNK, which focuses on stablecoin payments and cross-border settlement tools. The proposed deal would have significantly expanded Coinbase's stablecoin capabilities and followed other major moves in the space, including Stripes $1.1 billion purchase of bridge.

BVNK did not respond to requests for comment. Mistrial halts, case against brothers. Accused of 25 million MEV exploit, a federal judge has declared a mistrial in the case of Anton and James Pereira Bueno, two brothers charged with wire fraud and money laundering over an alleged $25 million exploit on Ethereum, jurors said they were exhausted, divided, and unable to reach a unanimous verdict after three days of deliberation. Prosecutors claimed the pair carried out, quote, the very first exploit of its kind, by abusing their positions as Ethereum validators to access private transactions and reorder a block for profit.

The defense countered that the action fell within Ethereum's own mechanics, likening it to, quote, stealing a base in baseball, end quote, rather than committing fraud. The deadlock has fueled debate over whether maximal extractable value tactics should be criminalized. On Unchain's new show, Dex in the City, crypto lawyer Jesse Brooks explained why this case was important and why she felt it's not wise to leave Crypto's future in the hands of 12 inexperienced jurors. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdhar. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovich and edited by Stephen Erlich.

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