How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other - Ep. 948
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Hey all, before we begin, I've got some exciting news to share. We've been working on something a little wild behind the scenes. It's called Unshade On Air, a revamped livestream series and podcast feed that takes you way beyond the headlines. It features sharp, maybe even controversial, takes on major events and the kind of on chain intel that never makes it to your feed. It premieres this week and it's packed. Way more shows, way more often, each one laser focused on a different slice of crypto and finance. First up is Decks in the City, where the wallets are cold and the takes are hot with
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, like, incumbent force where we should actually take this problem seriously and try to solve it.
Having built on x four zero two quite a bit over the past month, which is that the DevX is fundamentally better.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your new hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests 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 executio
Excited to be here.
So a quick heads up for people. Today's episode is actually prerecorded 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 livestream there where we have features like being able to buy featured coins and other fun stuff. Okay. So Eric and Sam, everyone is excited about Agentic 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 how about you
Yeah. So the Internet kinda 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. I'm gonna this is how I'm gonna send you data. This is how I'm gonna this is how you should render my data to your 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. Marc
I think there's an additional interesting historical anecdote there, which is when they were building the browser, Marc Andreessen and Tim Berners Lee in the nineties, 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 thirty 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
And so if it kind of was reserved for all those decades, then how was it that the, you know, x four zero two that we're talking about today, how did that come to be?
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