Deciphering the popular x402 protocol: How to unlock a new economy of ad-free, gas-free intelligent agents?

For decades, online advertising has been the only way the internet has survived.

Original text: x402 solves the original sin of the internet: ads

Author: aryan

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

For decades, online advertising has been the only way the internet has survived.

Everyone is vying for attention. To do this, companies collect all possible data about your surroundings, build user profiles, and then show you ads.

On the internet, this single model unlocks a market currently worth trillions of dollars.

Finance has always existed on the internet:

• Establish partnerships with payment service providers
• Set up a paywall for your website
• Or place advertisements

However, small payments (below $1) have historically been uneconomical (VISA/Mastercard charges approximately 2% + $0.10 per transaction), making advertising the only viable business model. This led to:

• Users can access a vast amount of content for free.
• Advertisers can accurately reach their target users
• Content providers earn revenue from their content.

This creates a win-win-win situation.

As the world moves towards intelligent agents:

• Intelligent agents are replacing humans as the primary consumers of content by acting as middleware.
• Advertisers will be unable to accurately reach human users, and the advertising economy may collapse.
• Intelligent agents now either steal (scrape) content or buy content.

Application Programming Interface (API) will replace browsers and proxy browsers [2] as the default communication mode.

Content theft is not a viable option for the internet, so content publishers will turn to charging small fees to their websites, and smart agents will need to have the ability to make payments. For decades, micropayments have been difficult to achieve until the emergence of blockchain technology broke this deadlock.

Blockchain technologies such as Solana enable large-scale micro-payments without imposing predatory fees on users.

The unified interface created by the x402 protocol can achieve the following functions:

• Consumers pay for content
• Content publishers profit from their content.
• No intermediaries (VISA/Mastercard) involved
• Enable smart agent micro-payment

When any client (smart agent, browser) sends a content access request, the content host will return a payment requirement. After the client completes the payment, it can obtain the content, which opens up a brand new economic model for the smart Internet.

The application areas I am particularly optimistic about:

• Gas-free user experience: I think one aspect that hasn't been fully explored is how x402 can enable users to make gas-free transactions on any network, where users only need to hold assets in their wallet to complete the payment.
• x402 Browser: Someone should be able to directly develop a secondary application based on the Chromium codebase, deeply integrating the x402 protocol into the browser kernel. In fact, Brave Browser is best suited to advance this plan. They are quite influential in the cryptocurrency field, have built-in wallet functionality, and support the IPFS protocol by default. In my opinion, they are currently the closest technical team to having the capability to implement this.
• On-chain marketplaces: Just as traditional markets suffer from discoverability issues, Coinbase addressed this pain point by launching "Bazaars" (meaning "marketplace" in Hindi). However, these currently offline-maintained marketplaces still have certain entry restrictions and urgently need an on-chain catalog system that allows anyone to add sellable resources (API interfaces/newsletters/e-books, etc.) and has a built-in rating mechanism similar to OpenRouter's rating of AI models.
• Ad Skipping: Like any new technology, x402's global adoption will take time. In the meantime, skipping ads through small payments will be a natural evolution of the protocol. Once users set an acceptable daily spending limit, the system will automatically skip ads and pay the corresponding fees to advertisers on behalf of the user when accessing YouTube using the x402 browser.

I've always been amazed at how a simple technology can unlock new economic models, and the x402 is one of them.

refer to

1. https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-sin/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
2. https://x.com/_0xaryan/status/1980928290337485294

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