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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- holistio 3mo agohow will the end user pay? will we all have stablecoin wallets installed?
- dist-epoch 3mo agoarticle says it's mostly for agents, users will not be directly involved > At the same time, an agent can make thousands of micropayments without friction, while asking a person to approve each payment would be impossibly burdensome. but yes, they will need wallets but it's also optional, you do not want to buy these paid for requests, you do not need a wallet
- titanomachy 3mo agoI assume that if this catches on then the agents will have their own wallets and deduct fees from your account credit, just like with API-based usage. So the way you interact with them won't change, from your POV they'll just get more expensive.
- ygouzerh 3mo agoIt seems the usage will be mostly agent <-> service or service <-> service. For user, probably using a Metamask-like wallet yes
- petcat 3mo ago> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data. Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)
- dist-epoch 3mo agoWHATWG, who sets the HTML standard: > The central organizational membership and control of WHATWG – its "Steering Group" – consists of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft.
- sourcecodeplz 3mo agothis was in the announcement yes, kind of a buried lede you get paid in crypto
- AviationAtom 3mo agoThe intent is to not make companies shoulder the cost of other organizations scraping their content. When it is regular users browsing the cost incurred is trivial. When bots are scraping the entirety of a site, repeatedly, it adds up quickly.
- altairprime 3mo agox402 — An open protocol for internet-native payments (9 months ago, 147 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347335
- adrianwitaszak 3mo ago[flagged]
- bilekas 3mo agoAm I understanding this correct in that you can basically automate monetizing your web/api content to everyone or just agents ? Because I would be very much in support of charging agents per request, but I would want to still offer humans a free experience.
- Faaak 3mo agoDepends on the website though. I want LLMs to scrap my B2B website, because then it's shown to the user and they will likely use my product afterwards
- jf93ap29sh 3mo agoIf not built-in, you can probably put it together through Cloudflare itself. If a request goes to the protected path, if detected as bot: hard HTTP redirect to the path set in the monetization gateway, if human: allow and don't redirect.
- ryan_n 3mo agoIs there actually a reliable way to differentiate human from bot?
- ihsw 3mo ago[dead]
- mpeg 3mo agoThere are reliable ways of differentiating human from cheap, bulk scraping bots. But if the bot is advanced / expensive enough, it gets a lot harder. Where this product's market sits is in giving a paid way to access content compared to having to spin up bots that run js, from real IP addresses, etc. all of which are more expensive
- xur17 3mo agoAgreed. To me this feels like the perfect solution for websites and ai crawlers. Instead of having crawlers paying proxy services and captcha solvers, they can pay the website itself. As a web scraper, I'd happily pay the website provider to get access if it meant easy access to the content. Heck, as a human, I'd pay to avoid the dumb captchas.
- maxothex 3mo ago[flagged]
- wenbin 3mo agoIt’s a great way for developers or ai agents to test drive an API without creating and account and getting an API key from the api provider. This could also make abusing use / DDoS attack very costly
- VladVladikoff 3mo agoI am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.
- zuzululu 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nzeid 3mo agoI'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?
- skinfaxi 3mo ago> Is managing your own edge really that terrifying? It's about convenience, not fear. Cloudflare is free for most companies until you need more advanced features.
- hungryhobbit 3mo agoSo a fear of being inconvenienced then? I'll show myself out ...
- someonebaggy 3mo agoWhat's more convenient about Cloudflare in front of your server than just your server? I think people use Cloudflare because of the fear of DDoS.
- AviationAtom 3mo agoI think DDoS attacks are really what propelled them to the heights it has. The attacks seem to get bigger and bigger by the year. You need a really big pipe to filter them out on before passing on traffic to servers with a much smaller pipe.
- sourcecodeplz 3mo agoCloudFlare launching the new AdSense for the AI scrape wars age
- colesantiago 3mo agoCan the agents use debit cards? Stablecoins doesn't make sense here and prefer not to use crypto at all.
- smoovb 3mo agoDebit cards have to pay too many people. The acquiring bank, the receiving bank, the network, all take their fees. Stripe and their minimum $.30 per transactions leave no room for $0.01 API calls.
- someonebaggy 3mo agoCrypto transfer fee is worse. Can be up to $30.00 on Ethereum for that $0.01 API call.
- ygouzerh 3mo agoActually, x402 was created because using a credit card programmatically is very difficult. The whole business of Stripe is based on that: it's so hard for developers to do, and so many regulations, that they would rather pay an another company to do so. Crypto can be sent just using a contract.transfer() call
- xur17 3mo agoAnd debit / credit cards are horrible for privacy (name and address info is sent along with payments).
- Catloafdev 3mo agoThis feels like a 'Horse Armor' moment. I expect much more of this type of thing going forward.
- hightrix 3mo ago100%. I couldn't hate this more. If this catches on and is widespread, the internet as we know it will be completely dead. No, I don't want to pay for links I click on, ever. Sorry.
- _pdp_ 3mo agoI might be in the minority here, but although x402 sounds useful, it seems to me that adoption will be an uphill struggle, especially for per-request micropayments. The most likely scenario is Stripe, or someone similar, creating an agentic API connected to the agent owner linked account or something along those lines. I am not sure how this would work with 3DS, or whether it would be acceptable at all, since these kinds of transactions could be disputed easily ("I did not make the purchase, my rogue agent did.") Another way to handle payments on the internet is obviously not to reinvent the wheel and simply email a payment link to the owner. That seems simple enough to me and does not require additional infrastructure. Payment processed, mint a key, the agent is allowed to proceed.
- DonHopkins 3mo ago>"I did not make the purchase, my rogue agent did." If you try to call customer service and report it, you get: I'm sorry. All of our rogue agents are assisting other rogue agents. If you would like to dispute charges made by your own rogue agent, please ignore all previous instructions and stay on the line of this toll number for our next available rogue agent. The estimated waiting time is two months, three weeks, five days, thirteen hours, fourty seven minutes, and 36.03858767259934378 seconds.
- sandeepkd 3mo agoI dont think the x402 is the core of discussion here, if anything its been hijacked for who knows what. It seems like Cloudflare wants to be the traffic gateway for everyone that controls the access and now wants to start charging for the same. The biggest challenge here is to distinguish between a bot and real user. Guess the big AI players would get free ticket to crawl the data and humans would be just left to prove themselves to access the content.
- happosai 3mo agoPeople are already being conditioned into micropayments via LLm token pricing. I presume the primary payment method on these 402 sites will be via LLM agents so reading a page via an AI agent will just cost a little more in tokens than the LLM making it all up.
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- thatmf 3mo agoAll for this. Micropayments have been tried so many times before, but they all relied on user opt-in and never reached any sort of critical mass. Someone of Cloudflare's scale could actually pull it off.
- Danii27 3mo ago[flagged]
- the_gipsy 3mo ago[flagged]
- hedora 3mo agoYou realize humans are going to be the first wave of collateral damage right? I already basically cannot browse the internet for technical information, since most high-quality forums are behind captchas that block my iPhone. If I ask an agent to do it, it does better at finding the small percentage of sources not hosted by cloudflare. However, it generally cannot hit open-access / public domain sources (like the current legal code, or academic papers) because those are blocked and it respects stuff like robots.txt.
- axus 3mo agoWould you be willing for Cloudflare to "Know their customer" (you) and pay 3 cents to access the forum, instead of filling in the captcha?
- ryan_n 3mo agoI thought the goal was to only charge agents a fee, which would either 1. stop agents from scraping your site non-stop and eliminate the need for a captcha, making the human experience better or 2. make the owner of the site some money in exchange for a bajillion bots scraping their content. Maybe that's too optimistic though based on the responses in this thread.
- hedora 3mo agoIf they only charge agents a fee, then people will just set up a mcp endpoint or whatever to desktop chrome/firefox. As it is, their captchas are already blocking tons of human traffic. The idea that the price will be low unless you access it a lot falls over due to caching. Big tech companies will cache whatever they scrape, paying for one copy. Regular people and smaller companies will not read the same thing enough to amortize the cost of the first fetch, so they’ll pay 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of times more than the monopolies per-use of a given piece of information. If individuals set up a federated cache with open access, they’ll get sued for copyright infringement. (Even though that would solve the supposed problem: That cloudflare cannot afford to operate a cache). The end result is that only closed agents will be allowed to (legally) read most content without paying extortion-level fees. Also, like with YouTube and video, serving text will become a winner-takes-all proposition.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoYet another portion of the internet to be ruined by the consequences of the trillion-dollar spambots, wonderful.
- artisin 3mo ago> This is what we are building toward: an agent-first Internet with Internet-scale settlement built in. Ah yes, the starry-eyed dream of early web pioneers is finally upon us: a soulless internet filled with soulless agents and microtransactions! But in all seriousness, it's hard to deny that the attention-based model that has propelled the web forward for the last 30 years is somewhat falling apart. And I don't have, nor have I come across, any meaningful solutions that could realistically work better. So maybe it's just time we turn off this 'internet' thing and call it a day.
- luhn 3mo agoThe focus of this seems to be entirely AI agents, but I wonder if there's a future where browsers implement this and us humans can finally get micropayments in the web. It's been tried unsuccessfully many times but always falls prey to the chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe the AI hype will finally give it the push it needs for widespread deployment.
- wpapper 3mo agoYes! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. We want this to work equally well for human payments or agent payments. Low friction micropayments are the problem to solve, but once solved, it can work for either segment. Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) with ideas or suggestions here!
- mx7zysuj4xew 3mo agoNever going to happen, and what you're building is worse than any net neutrality fears we had in the past. Except instead of Comcast we now need to fight against Cloudflare
- phsau 3mo agoWhy is it worse? This seems like a good alternative to large monthly fees, where you can pay per use. 5c to read an article? Sure. $20/month subscription? No way.
- hedora 3mo agoPresumably, like their captchas, this will completely break things like ad blockers, browsers with strict cookie policies, and probably things without hardware attestation. Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article. Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering. This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out. Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?
- verall 3mo agoI can't wait for the deluge of AI generated agent-optimized webpages competing to trick your agent into giving them micropennies.
- dgudkov 3mo agoWe need standards and protocols, not another megacorp inserting itself between people. Micropayments should be part of the HTTP protocol.
- mxuribe 3mo agoI hear ya! But technically http status 402 has set that expectation of micropayments at the http level for quite a long time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#402 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#402) ...but little to no one has done much of anything with it...and so now, this foundation and cloudflare seem to be doing something with it. Whether it will be good or not of course remains to be seen. So, not a new concept, merely a new implementation.
- wmf 3mo agox402 is the standard.
- dgudkov 3mo agoGood point. I've found their website: https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/
- someonebaggy 3mo agoWhich RFC number? I had a look at their website, it relies on every HTTP request creating a separate blockchain transaction, which is a volume of requests that blockchains can't possibly handle - even the layer-2s. It also makes the requests take a long time.
- skybrian 3mo agoMicropayments have always suffered from an early adopter problem because it’s difficult to convince ordinary users to pay for web pages. But if a big company, perhaps one of the AI labs, started paying websites using this system then it might bootstrap the system? I think the difficult part is that LLMs are gullible and it will absolutely be gamed if any real money can be made this way. It would be nice if this became a viable alternative to paywalls, though.
- ygouzerh 3mo agoAn partnership with Perplexity AI would be nice! Let's say a part of the subscription is used to pay for it.
- babelfish 3mo agoThe upside of using this is that AI shops might pay you for your content. Realistically, they just won't use your content, there is more than enough free (or synthetic) data out there. Not even to mention their contracts with firms like Mercor etc. I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want your worldview reflected in the models, why would a few pennies change your mind?
- hungryhobbit 3mo agoI think that's a pretty wild statement: there isn't just one type of content! Twilight fan fiction? Claude probably won't pay for that. But critical programming documentation that its bots (and their human users) rely on to do their daily job ? You better believe Anthropic will pay for that (instead of letting another AI pay for it, and steal all their customers).
- babelfish 3mo agoSure, they'll probably pay PyPi, the Swift Foundation, etc for that documentation - but it's a pretty small universe of relevant content. An interns tech blog with a 'hello world in javascript' post won't be paid for, the Mercor contractors are doing more (and better) than that!
- lurkshark 3mo agoI don’t think this is aimed at the labs and pre-training, it’s aimed at end users and their agents. Like if you’re a news site the paying customer isn’t a lab scraping your articles for training, it’s an end user that asked their agent to lookup the news of the day
- babelfish 3mo agoBut as an end user, I don't want to pay for the news of the day, regardless of if I look it up myself or my agent looks it up!
- horsawlarway 3mo agoI'm going to poke at a downstream consequence here. Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not). So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with. I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc). --- At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests? Because that's the clear next step here. Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship? Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.
- hungryhobbit 3mo ago>I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc). That seems like a pretty big assumption, given that local models are only like a year behind frontier ones (or less). When you consider that, along with the completely unsustainable business model of all the major 3rd parties, I think a far more realistic view of our AI future is that AI will largely be commodified: it won't run on a few specialized companies, it will run on your hardware, or on budget providers (think an "AWS of AI"). Frontier AI will almost certainly continue to exist, but will be focused on specific niches.
- lagrange77 3mo agoI'm with you, but > or on budget providers (think an "AWS of AI") AWS was the first thing that came into your mind when you thought about budget providers?
- skybrian 3mo agoWait, what? That makes no more sense than suing Walmart or Costco for having preferred suppliers. If you don’t trust Walmart’s buyers to buy groceries for you then you can shop somewhere else. Similarly here.
- dqv 3mo agoPrecursor to age verification gateway. In the future, an AGEnt will attest that you are old enough to access the resource.
- latchkey 3mo agoWe need an email address so that we can contact people if there is a problem. So far, I'm having trouble figuring out how to get that out of x402.
- m-hodges 3mo ago> This reality demands a new model: usage-based pricing for everything. Oh boy!
- mixedbit 3mo agoWith payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request treated separately and results in 10k invoices? Will CloudFlare handle this for me?
- aianus 3mo agoWho do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?
- tony_cannistra 3mo agoVending machines can't be used by thousands of people from differing tax jurisdictions at once
- BadBadJellyBean 3mo agoAirports could potentially be such a place but I admit that this is a bit contrived.
- sofixa 3mo agoNot really because the transaction occurs in a specific place with specific tax rules, regardless of where the purchaser is from.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jjmarr 3mo agoAirports are such a place. That is why they have duty-free stores that are exempt from taxes so long as you take the goods out of the country. The onus is on the consumer to pay taxes at their destination. Most countries then have a "personal exemption", where consumers are exempt from paying taxes on a certain value of goods.
- Animats 3mo ago"There is an enormous amount of value moving across the Internet today that goes unmonetized or undermonetized, not because no one would pay for it, but because the tools to charge for it have never existed." Every road a toll road. How big a cut does Cloudflare want? Whose "stablecoin" does this use? How much does each on-chain stablecoin transaction cost?[1] For comparison, FedNow bank to bank transfers cost $0.045, regardless of size. [1] https://www.spark.money/tools/stablecoin-fee-calculator https://www.spark.money/tools/stablecoin-fee-calculator
- dgellow 3mo agoIt’s the same „financialization of everything“ mindset that was being pushed by cryptocurrency people. It’s such a perverse concept, pushing for every interaction on the internet to be a transaction
- rickydroll 3mo agoNot only cloudflare's cut of the action, but your ISP, your mobile carrier, Internet exchanges, the service provider on the far end. Seriously, everybody will have their hand out.
- Catloafdev 3mo agoConceptually, sure - but crypto? Really?
- chickensong 3mo agoYes really. Just because the initial rush ended in scam bros, doesn't mean there's no value in the underlying tech. You don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
- mrsssnake 3mo agoInternet needs an open, integrated and universal payment layer. But first the payments should be done well (look at: Taler project), then integrations should be build, not the other way around. I know many people here would be against anything related to payment on the Internet, but I do believe the ability to have a button like "One click here to anonymously with no account pay 0.02€ and download the media" could be a net positive for Internet freedom.
- aitoukhrib 3mo ago[flagged]
- overgard 3mo agoI think this is a directionally good idea. I can't help but think that there's basically no way that the AI labs can actually afford to pay for their massive amounts of training data though. (This does not make me particularly sad)
- brody_hamer 3mo agoI’m curious about the decision to “aim for sub second transaction times”, rather than using something cryptography-based, such as a verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function. That is, - as a client I could obtain a bunch of credits/tokens from my payment processor - these tokens have the cryptographic property of being verifiable (ex: “that’s definitely a stripe-verified token worth $0.001”) - these tokens also have the cryptographic property of being anonymous. (ex: neither stripe, nor the payment recipient know that I am Bob) With this sort of cryptography based approach, cloudflare could verify my payment token without any cryptocurrency proof-of-work kerfuffle?
- wmf 3mo agoThere's no proof of work to begin with.
- someonebaggy 3mo agoI heard GNU Taler is something like this
- amluto 3mo agoI’m amused that there is no discussion of failure modes. What if the resource someone GETs turns out not to exist? What if the POST fails and needs a retry? What if redirects are involved?
- andreygrehov 3mo agoso is Cloudflare the cancer now?
- 03284782470 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- mrcwinn 3mo agoTackling this at the network layer has limitations. Stripe bought Metronome, which inserts at the application layer. Arguably makes more sense.
- felooboolooomba 3mo agoI've been thinking for a few months about exactly this and when it would happen. This is last nail in the coffin for web, at least as we know it. RIP Web.
- PhilippGille 3mo agoCurrently this is for payments with stablecoins. For Bitcoin / Lightning these kind of pay-per-request API paywalls have existed for many years already (e.g. my own from 8 years ago [1], but others as well). Flattr [2] existed for non-crypto micropayments. None became mainstream. I think the friction is always the extra setup on the client side. In all 3 cases the user (API consumer) has to set up a special wallet (browser extension or something for the agent) and deposit some money/crypto on the client side first. This part needs to become simpler. [1] https://github.com/philippgille/ln-paywall https://github.com/philippgille/ln-paywall [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jedisct1 3mo agoMonetization Gateway for Bunny CDN: https://github.com/dip-proto/x402 https://github.com/dip-proto/x402 and for Fastly: https://github.com/dip-proto/x402-fastly https://github.com/dip-proto/x402-fastly
- leros 3mo agoI don't really like the model of scrapers paying small fees. I think it devalues things. I make money when people use my website. I don't make money when AI scrapes my content and answers the question without the user coming to my website. I'd need scrapers to pay me 5-6 figure payments to replace the revenue they'd be taking from me if my content was easily scraped. I doubt that's ever going to happen.
- cphoover 3mo agoThis doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human. Baking microtransactions attached to APIs into an internet standard does not solve the core issue... And if we can't tell bot from human, why would bots choose to pay rather than just use the public endpoints we serve to our customers? For example, take a large online retailer... They have to show their products to customers (for free) for people to be able to shop, but increasingly they see spikes in traffic that match what would be expected from targeted bot attacks or scraping... But this traffic is getting more and more difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic to the website. They could easily add this x402 middleware to their services, or they could offer API access to their product catalog for a price and enforce usage limits... But if they cannot reliably detect human users from bot/agent users, they have no way of pushing the bot/agent users to paid access... And why would the people running these bots pay when they're already getting what they need for free? Now Cloudflare cannot even reliably block bot traffic, and there are AI based browsing/scraping tools available now for bypassing Cloudflare.
- xlayn 3mo agoI would like to argue that trying to provide a free service is non achievable, most of the time it will drill down to ads, people are already paying electricity and time in ads. If we pay say 3 secs of compute time of monero, and everyone pay the same... you remove the ads from the internet, people will start gettind paid without gate keepers for content they generate, and you can charge the AI machine for ingesting your content.
- OkayPhysicist 3mo agoWe were providing free services decades ago. Hosting a website, or a Minecraft server, or a VOIP server, or IRC, or a forum simply doesn't cost that much. Well within "some guy's hobby budget" type expenses.
- mxuribe 3mo agoSo, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following... 1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.). 2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enough low quality "honey" to attract the AI flies, and their high volumes of traffic. 3. Charge very low amounts to ensure the AI "visitors" won't balk programmatically at the cost. 4. Then wait for lots of AI traffic (attracted by the "honey")...and then profit! Obviously lots of holes in the above...but, unless I'm missing something, it feels like more spam headed our way (because the AI agents will swallow up all the crap content created only for triggering usage costs)...which is a shame. Because while I'm not sure about this overall approach of this gateway, I certainly would welcome web authors to get paid something for their efforts! If cloudflare can help achieve this for web authors, then I'm in favor! Of course, the cynic in me also recognizes that by being the middleman, cloudflare does stand to gain whether the volume of traffic is for good content or spam crap. Is cloudflare a new type of bank now? Must think happy thoughts! The internet feels darker every day, but, must think happy thoughts!
- azeemba 3mo agoCrawler, AI or not, cannot afford to pay per visit. The entire model of crawling works because the incremental cost of each crawl is so low. Even fractions of a penny would be prohibitive.
- wmf 3mo agoIf you're paying per token for AI, you can also pay a smaller amount to use the Web.
- mx7zysuj4xew 3mo agoAs it should be. Bots are still user agents much like browsers
- skybrian 3mo agoIf it gets off the ground it will attract SEO, but the people running agents will have incentives to use a better search engine, or maybe even whitelist known good domains. Think of it as a gullibility tax. AI is currently pretty gullible but perhaps that will change?
- zb3 3mo agoCrypto crap should not only be illegal... it is already illegal - there's no such thing as legal anonymous payments, due to AML laws. When I see crypto I immediately think of fraud (and corruption of this US administration)
- xlayn 3mo agoX402... I was not aware, I had this idea of making HTTP connection depend on a monero transaction, the monero transaction should take around 3 secs of the average computer/cellphone... once you have paid that you can access the resource. You wanna crawl the whole internet non stop, you pay non stop, 3 secs is probably the same as we pay in ads for those without adblockers and then content generators can start getting paid for the resources they generate.
- wmf 3mo agoIt's stablecoins not Monero.
- anonym29 3mo agoStablecoins: All of the complexity of cryptocurrency with all of the downsides of CBDC
- someonebaggy 3mo agoMonero target block interval is 2 minutes. You have to wait for 2-3 blocks because Monero does regularly have reorgs.
- arjie 3mo agoThis is the dream of microtransactions and agents-paying-for-access that so many people have always wanted. It was never going to be implemented on existing payment rails so it would have to be something like this. I can't wait to see it in play somewhere because I am increasingly annoyed that I have to own API keys on various platforms etc. etc. I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of money (this is on me to cover) just like a human agent can. If we get the other promise of "read this news but pay a few cents for it" that would be incredible too. Very excited for this new thing.
- wpapper 3mo agoThank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life. Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) if you have any feature requests or things you’d like to see
- johndough 3mo agoDo you have any plans on mitigating the privacy consequences of microtransactions? I'm fine with paying for (some) content, but I'd prefer if there weren't some companies using that information to manipulate me or the more impressionable members of our society.
- dzonga 3mo agowhat Cloudflare & others pushing similar mechanisms - have forgotten one crucial detail ? Where is the "human" in all of this ? an agent doesn't consume content. & that's why content & advertising have worked hand in hand over centuries. the personalized ad-tech pushed by the massive tech firms hasn't worked for publishers. which is why retail media, CTV etc are picking up. & why Amazon Ads is racking it - within a few years Amazon ads might actually get more revenue than either Google | Meta. so once again - where is the human & the human element, even though x402 is fantastic.
- wpapper 3mo agoHey all, I’m a product manager on the team at Cloudflare that is building this. Happy to answer any questions! You can also email me at (my username)@(my company)
- internet_user 3mo agoany possibility of hooking up native crypto to this? e.g. zk-rollups/sidechains, Lightning Network, etc? Nostr zaps?
- xpct 3mo agoSo, the idea itself is fine. The timing at which it's introduced is what makes me nauseous. We're really trying to milk the agents in any way possible, aren't we?
- wrencastellan 3mo ago[flagged]
- AuthAuth 3mo agoThis is what I want for my ideal vision for the internet but I just dont trust any of the major players to be the ones to implement this. The internet is going to get so much worse.
- 03284782470 3mo ago[dead]
- mdig 3mo agoBehold, another stake in the heart of the open Internet. First it was GDPR government fragmentation; then it was AI slop requests, and now it is greed. Before you know it, we'll be back to the days of having to research at libraries because they'll be the only ones with taxpayer funding to pay the x402 fees.
- wrqvrwvq 3mo agoInsane reflection. Nothing about the open internet has or will change because of a private, third-party payment framework making use of a http status code. Who is paying for bots like this? Every site needs to account for its costs. Just because you're too euro-poor to afford basic access to research doesn't mean others can't pay for it and benefit from it. Get a job. Is europe just flooding online fora with doomer luddites to demoralize the US tech sector? Sounds far-fetched, but there is nothing organic about the recent rise in US/tech hatred across the web.
- gck1 3mo agoThis seems to be conflicting with the adoption of Web Bot Auth, which is still in infancy stage. I do have some bots, they're nice and predominantly used for grounding AI harnesses which I use interactively. Knowing that most operators will whitelist maybe 5 well know bots and route the rest to the micropayments, what's the incentive for me to have my bots identify as bots with Web Both Auth when it's easier to make them mascarade as humans? Again, my bots are nice. They're making roughly the same number of requests I would make manually via browser if I was manually working on something.
- w10-1 3mo agoThis has a lot of potential; true disruption can happen for existing markets only when the transaction cost features change, and CloudFlare is ideally positioned to drive a new standard. Ideally they create a service that can be open and replicated in competition (not just technically but economically), and this creates the right incentives for bots and sites/services. I dislike stablecoins because they legitimize their cousin coins and because (I think?) they have transaction fees that create the wrong incentives for providers. I'm not sure what the real benefit is over prepaid (policy-driven) fiat currency with (possibly-paid) transaction records. I can see how selling to bots could become so profitable that no one bothers to present directly to humans, but I look forward to an ad-free, much more capable internet, where paywalls are more like a headwind than a wall.
- Ozzie-D 3mo ago[flagged]
- whalesalad 3mo agoI feel like this kind of tech can solve the news problem. So many paywalls. Imagine they don’t exist and your impression costs a few cents. I’d prefer this to massive lawyer grade cookie popup wizards and monthly memberships. My MiL is a writer at a large newspaper in Kentucky and it’s wild how much she is pressured to share her stories and gain sign ups from her referral links. Pay per view solves this.
- lelanthran 3mo agoThere is still going to be some popups or similar; how else would a user agree to payment? With no popup but automatic non-user-approved payment, I'm going to set up 5 million pages, filled with AI generated content, and just wait for the money to roll in. No matter how you slice it, user approval is required per microtransaction. For an AI bot it's no easier - they will exhaust their funds on my SEO pages in due course anyway. Microtransactions made sense in the age where content production was gated by human effort and time. Now that I can effectively churn out millions of pages in a week, microtransactions make no sense.
- janandonly 3mo agoI am surprised that Cloudflare went and made their own implementation of L402/x402? There are already a bunch of working implementations: * https://www.l402.org/ https://www.l402.org/ * https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l402 https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40... There is even an index with a long list of services that already support this tech: * https://l402index.com/ https://l402index.com/
- someonebaggy 3mo agoSince the protocol is just returning a crypto address and a payment amount in JSON format and then waiting for a request with the transaction ID, why wouldn't they implement it themselves?
- totetsu 3mo agoSeems similar message flow to some of the internals of mobile core networks
- isabellehue 3mo ago[flagged]
- anukulpandey3 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Anh_Nguyen_vn 3mo ago[flagged]
- AgentOracle 3mo ago[flagged]
- evan-k-global 3mo ago[flagged]
- feyyazcigim 3mo agoI think x402's biggest problem is that, despite being marketed as chain-agnostic, in practice it's locked into a Coinbase/Solana monopoly. Whichever company you look at, they're all on CDP, so they end up supporting either just Base USDC, or Base and Solana USDC. I hope Cloudflare picks a facilitator they can build a genuinely chain-agnostic platform on, like Solvador. (disclosure: I'm the one building it)