x402 is enabling the internet to skip ads and enter the era of micropayments
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x402 is enabling the internet to skip ads and enter the era of micropayments
Like any technology, the world needs time to adapt to x402.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: @_0xarayan
Translation: TechFlow
For decades, online advertising has been the sole model sustaining the internet.
Everyone is competing for attention. To achieve this, companies collect all possible user-related data, build user profiles, and serve ads accordingly.
The Proxy Web and Original Sin
This single model has created a market now worth trillions of dollars.
Finance has always existed on the internet:
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Partnering with payment service providers
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Implementing paywalls to restrict access
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Or serving advertisements
However, micropayments (under $1) have long been economically unfeasible (Visa/Mastercard charge around 2% + $0.10 per transaction), making advertising the only viable model:
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Users gain free access to vast amounts of content
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Advertisers can precisely target audiences to promote products
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Publishers can monetize their content
It’s a win-win for everyone.
As the world moves toward an era of agents:
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Agents will replace humans as content consumers, becoming intermediaries
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Advertisers will no longer be able to target humans directly, causing the ad economy to collapse
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Agents will either "scrape" content or purchase it directly
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APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) will become the default mode of communication, replacing interactions via browsers or browser automation
User Path
Scraping or stealing content is economically unsustainable for the internet. Publishers will therefore shift to charging micropayments for website access, and agents will need a way to pay these fees. Micropayments have remained impractical for decades—until the emergence of blockchain.
Blockchains like @Solana make large-scale micropayments possible while avoiding user exploitation.
x402 is a unified interface built on the 402 standard that enables:
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Consumers to pay for content
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Publishers to receive payments for content
All without intermediaries (like Visa or Mastercard), making agent-based micropayments a reality.
Source: payai.network
When any client (agent/browser) sends a request to access content, the content host responds by requesting payment. Once the client pays, access is granted—ushering in a new economic model for the agent-driven internet.
Use Cases That Excite Me
Gasless User Experience: One underexplored area is how x402 can enable gasless transactions across any network—users simply need assets in their wallet to complete transactions.
x402 Browser: Someone should fork Chromium and integrate x402 directly into the browser. @Brave should do this—they already have strong crypto user recognition, built-in wallet functionality, and default IPFS support. In my view, they're the most likely team to pull it off.
On-chain Marketplace: Traditional markets face discovery issues. @CoinbaseDev addressed this with bazaars ("marketplace" in Hindi), but these are centrally maintained and inherently limited. Someone should create an on-chain directory where anyone can list content for sale (APIs/newsletters/books, etc.) with a built-in rating system, similar to OpenRouter's model ratings.
Skip Ads: Like any technology, the world needs time to adapt to x402. In the interim, micropayments could be used to skip ads—a natural evolution. Users could set a daily spending preference; when visiting YouTube, an x402 browser would automatically skip ads and pay advertisers on their behalf.
I'm always amazed by how simple technologies unlock new economies—x402 is one of them.
If you're building in this space, whether on the buyer or seller side, feel free to reach out. We're building something for you.
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