x402 is enabling the internet to skip ads and enter the micropayment era.

Author: @_0xarayan

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

For decades, online advertising has been the only way for the internet to survive.

Everyone is competing for attention. To achieve this goal, companies collect all possible data related to users, create user profiles, and show advertisements to users.

Proxy Networks and Original Sin

In the internet, this single model has opened up a market that is now worth trillions of dollars.

Finance has always existed on the internet:

Collaborate with payment service providers

Set up a paywall to restrict website access

or display advertisements

However, micropayments (less than $1) have been economically unfeasible (Visa/Mastercard charges about 2% + $0.10 per transaction), thus advertising has become the only model:

Users can access a vast amount of content for free.

Advertisers can precisely target user groups to promote products.

Content publishers can profit from their content.

This is a win-win situation for everyone.

As the world gradually moves towards the era of agency:

Agents are beginning to replace humans as content consumers and are gradually becoming an intermediary layer.

Advertisers will no longer be able to target humans directly, and the advertising economy will face collapse.

Agents either “scrape” content or purchase content directly.

API (Application Programming Interface) will become the default communication mode, rather than interacting through a browser or proxy browser.

User Path

It is economically unfeasible for the internet to scrape or steal content, so content publishers will turn to charging micropayments for their websites, while agents will need a way to pay these fees. For decades, micropayments have been unattainable until the advent of blockchain.

Blockchains like @Solana make large-scale micropayments possible while avoiding user exploitation.

x402 is a unified interface built on the 402 standard, capable of achieving:

Consumers pay for content fees

The publisher charges content fees

This all eliminates the need for intermediaries (such as Visa or Mastercard), making agent-based micropayments a reality.

Source: payai.network

When any client (proxy/browser) sends a request to access content, the content host will respond and require payment for the content. Once the client completes the payment, they will gain access to the content, thus opening up a new economy of a proxy-based internet.

I feel excited about the use case

Gas-free user experience: I believe an underexplored area is how x402 can enable users to execute transactions on any network with a gas-free experience, where users only need to hold assets in their wallet to complete transactions.

x402 Browser: Someone should fork Chromium directly and integrate x402 into the browser. @Brave should actually do this, as they have good user recognition in the crypto space, already have wallet functionality, and support IPFS by default. In my opinion, they are the team most likely to achieve this.

On-chain marketplace: Traditional markets have issues with discovery, and @CoinbaseDev addressed this by introducing bazaars (the Hindi word for “market”), but these are centralized marketplaces that will always have certain limitations. Someone should create an on-chain directory that allows anyone to add what they are selling (APIs/newsletters/books, etc.) and embed a rating mechanism in the directory, similar to how OpenRouter rates models.

Skip Ads: Like any technology, the world needs time to adapt to x402. In the meantime, ads can be skipped through micropayments, which will be a natural development direction for x402. Users can set a daily preferred spending limit, and when accessing YouTube, the x402 browser will automatically skip ads and pay fees to advertisers.

I am always amazed at how simple technologies unlock new economies, and x402 is one of them.

If you are developing in this field, whether as a seller or a buyer, feel free to contact me. We are building something for you.