Kill Ads: x402 Is Ending the "Original Sin" of the Internet

Original Author: aryan (@_0xaryan)

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

Edited and organized by: BitpushNews

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

Everyone is competing for attention. To achieve this, companies collect all possible data about you, build user profiles, and show you ads.

Agent Networks and Original Sin

This single model has opened up a market worth trillions of dollars on the internet.

Finance has always existed on the internet:

• Cooperate with payment providers

• Set up paywalls for your website

• Or display ads

However, micropayments (less than $1) have not been economically viable in the past (Visa/Mastercard charge about 2% + $0.10 per transaction), so advertising became the only model, in which:

• Users can access massive amounts of content for free

• Advertisers can find target users for their products

• Content publishers can get paid for their content

This is a win-win for everyone.

As the world moves toward agents:

• Agents are becoming consumers of content by acting as middleware, rather than humans.

• Advertisers can no longer target humans, and the ad economy will collapse.

• Agents now either steal (scrape) content or buy content.

• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) will become the default mode of communication, rather than browser agents/proxy browsers.

User Pathways

Scraping or stealing content is not economically viable for the internet, so publishers will turn to charging small fees for their website content, and agents will need a way to pay these fees. For decades, micropayments have not been possible until the advent of blockchain.

Blockchains like @solana make large-scale micropayments possible without exploiting users.

x402, a standard built on the 402 concept, creates a unified interface for the following parties:

• Consumers pay for content

• Publishers charge for content

• No intermediaries (Visa/Mastercard)

Making agent micropayments possible.

Source: payai.network

Any client (agent/browser) sends a request to access content, the content host responds and requests payment for the content, the client processes the payment and gains access to the content, thereby unlocking a new economy for the agent internet.

Use cases I am excited about:

Gasless User Experience: I think an underexplored aspect is how x402 allows users to make transactions on any network without paying gas fees, as long as they have assets in their wallet.

x402 Browser: Someone should directly fork Chromium and build x402 into the browser itself. @brave really should do this, as they have a good reputation in crypto, already have a wallet, and support IPFS by default. I think they are the most likely to achieve this at present.

On-chain Marketplace: Just like in traditional markets, there is a discoverability problem. @Coinbase Dev solved this by introducing Bazaars (markets in Hindi), but these are off-chain maintained markets and always have some limitations. Someone should create an on-chain directory where anyone can add what they are selling (APIs/newsletters/books, etc.), and, like OpenRouter does for models, build a rating system into the directory.

Skip Ads: Like any technology, the world needs time to adopt x402. In the meantime, micropayments can be used to skip ads, which would be a great natural progression for x402. You set your daily spending limit, go to YouTube, and the x402 browser will automatically skip ads for you and pay the advertisers.

I am always amazed at how a simple technology can unlock new economic forms, and x402 is one of them.