x402 Track: Crypto Rewrites the Story of Pay

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

In recent discussions about the x402 track, most people are defining x402 using traditional payment logic, such as the passive promotion rhythm of Cloudflare, or worrying about whether Google support is reliable. Looking at it this way, it’s completely wrong because when Pay meets Crypto, the story might be rewritten:

1) The rule that traditional payment channels dominate on the seller side will not change. API sellers, who are the payment collection parties, indeed need infrastructure giants like Cloudflare to promote. They will leverage a top-down channel network, using a one-click x402 payment gateway to connect the seller side group at scale;

But they can’t just wait passively for Cloudflare. The first cut in rewriting the Pay story with Crypto is to use tokens to incentivize and gather sellers.

There are many ways: for example, a facilitator competition begins, rewarding token incentives to API providers that connect to x402; or, some API aggregator platforms will package traditional APIs into x402-compatible ones, earning arbitrage profits and encouraging traditional sellers to authorize access;

2) On the buyer side, theoretically, there should be a group of Agents with payment needs. But the current problem is that most Agents don’t have practical payment needs—they are mostly chatbots calling APIs for free. What to do?

The second cut in rewriting the story with Crypto is to use a launchpad token issuance wave to fill the buyer gap en masse.

When a large number of Agents with payment functions are generated, tokens will be issued during the payment process, or by making payment requests that offer profit opportunities, naturally creating a large demand for “buyers”. Even if there is a bubble, at least the infrastructure upstream and downstream of the entire payment channel will accelerate in prosperity during this process.

3. The logic of facilitator competition is similar. If it’s just about competing for payment pipeline coverage, the natural outcome is approaching free, and the business ceiling for facilitators becomes zero. But don’t forget, as a key node that facilitates payment behavior, facilitators can upgrade “free pipelines” into “traffic entrances” through token empowerment.

Facilitators ultimately are about the business logic of routing and distribution. Token cashback, token incentives, priority settlement, path recommendations, etc., could all become their new business models;

4. In traditional payment systems, Visa and MasterCard are just infrastructure collecting transit fees, with a near-monopoly situation. But in the x402 track, every x402 transaction directly translates into on-chain TVL growth, Gas fee income, and other ecosystem benefits, which will inevitably lead to a wave of multi-chain infrastructure and token competition around x402.

Although Base has a unique advantage, x402 as an open protocol will become a battleground for many chains. For example, Base’s creator economy can quickly develop popular projects based on x402; Solana’s x402 hackathon is likely to reignite the second wave of AI Agents; Monad, as a high-concurrency performance chain, might see GameFi + x402 become their flagship application scenarios, and so on.

That’s all.

First, I want to clarify that I don’t like Crypto constantly repeating the bubble story of “asset issuance”.

But compared to traditional payment, which involves building infrastructure first and then waiting for applications to gradually land, Crypto will definitely adopt a flywheel model of first creating token false prosperity, then using that prosperity to push real applications.

Do you understand now?

When Pay meets Crypto, it’s not just about rewriting the payment method, but the entire cold start logic.