Metis Ecosystem x402 New Experiment: 500 million BANG tokens minted out, how does GMPayer drive cross-chain autonomous payments for AI Agents?

Author: momo, ChainCatcher

 

The explosive popularity of the x402 protocol has brought a long-overlooked issue to the forefront: automatic payments between AI Agents require a more efficient and automated underlying protocol than human payment systems. By redefining the HTTP 402 status code, x402 indeed provides a foundational syntax for micropayments between machines.

However, the birth of the x402 protocol is only the starting point for the implementation of AI Agent payments, not the end. It defines "when to pay," but does not answer more complex business logic such as "how to fairly distribute money" or "how to verify that services have been delivered." These underlying issues are precisely the real bottlenecks preventing the AI Agent economy from moving from demonstration to large-scale application.

Against this backdrop, many experimental projects have emerged around the real-world implementation of AI Agent payments. Among them, the new developments in the x402 space within the Metis ecosystem are particularly noteworthy.

This week, the Web3-native AI protocol LazAI, incubated by Metis, together with ZKM, Metis, and GOAT Network, launched the x402-driven multi-currency payment system GMPayer (GOAT-Metis-Payer). In simple terms, the launch of GMPayer aims to make the x402 protocol truly usable, enabling AI agents to make instant payments across chains and in multiple currencies, without intermediaries, accounts, or human intervention.

GMPayer also introduced a proof-of-concept token, $BANG, allowing users to experience this payment system. Community participation was very high: the 500 million minting quota on the GOAT Network and Metis Andromeda chains was snapped up within 7.5 hours, with nearly 2,000 addresses participating and generating over 100,000 transactions in total.

How does GMPayer, launched by LazAI in collaboration with multiple Metis ecosystem projects, actually implement AI Agent payments? What are its advantages? What does this mean for the Metis ecosystem? This article provides a systematic overview.

Why is LazAI's deployment of x402 inevitable?

This year, the Metis ecosystem has undergone a significant strategic update: the launch of its AI strategy. Its positioning is no longer limited to Layer2, but as infrastructure for the integration of blockchain and AI.

The specific implementation of this strategy relies on Metis ecosystem's co-evolving trinity architecture: Andromeda serves as a solid settlement layer, ensuring the security and finality of assets and transactions; above it, Hyperion acts as a high-performance computing layer, providing the necessary high throughput and low latency environment for AI applications; and at the top, LazAI is the application layer that transforms the underlying infrastructure into real user experiences, creating perceivable value and playability for users.

In August, LazAI launched its testnet. During the testnet phase, LazAI focused on solving core issues in the AI field such as the lack of quality verification and unfair revenue distribution. Its DAT (Data Anchoring Token) standard is central to addressing these problems.

With the explosive popularity of the x402 protocol, LazAI now has even greater utility. LazAI uses DAT to define "what has value" and "to whom the value belongs," but it needs a mechanism to realize "how value is exchanged." The payment trigger standard protocol of x402 happens to provide this missing link. The combination of the two enables every API call to automatically complete value assessment, payment triggering, and revenue distribution.

How does GMPayer create a closed loop for AI Agent payments?

LazAI has validated the feasibility of pay-per-use, cross-chain payments, and the AI Agent economy by launching the specific x402 application product GMPayer. According to the GMPayer official website, it builds a payment closed loop for the AI Agent economy through four core components: DAT, Facilitator, iDAO, and the x402 settlement layer.

First, GMPayer solves the problem of how to fairly distribute value. Through LazAI's DAT (Data Anchoring Token) standard, GMPayer can clearly record the assetization information of data, copyright sources, and revenue distribution targets, solidifying "who contributed what" as immutable on-chain records.

When an AI service is called, the relevant DAT triggers GMPayer's x402 settlement layer smart contract, which automatically executes pay-per-call and real-time revenue sharing. This ensures that all value creators, such as data contributors and model developers, can receive precise and immediate rewards, establishing a trustworthy contribution-reward system at the protocol level.

On the basis of fair distribution, trust and verification in payments become the next hurdle to overcome.

GMPayer introduces a decentralized, verifiable payment coordinator called Facilitator. Unlike traditional centralized black boxes, it is a settlement agent built on technologies such as SPV, ZKP, and TEE. Its payment verification and settlement processes can be independently proven, and users can verify transactions themselves, ensuring transparency and censorship resistance throughout the process.

At the same time, to resolve potential disputes and assess service quality, the system also introduces a BFT consensus-based iDAO governance model for decentralized arbitration and quality evaluation, providing a second layer of trust for the network.

To practically validate the payment process, GMPayer launched the proof-of-concept token $BANG. $BANG was issued simultaneously on Metis Andromeda and GOAT Network, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens—500 million on each chain, with 250 million per chain for token minting and 250 million for liquidity.

Participants can obtain 5,000 $BANG by donating a specific token worth $1 (such as $xMETIS or $xGOATED) through the x402 payment interface. This process generates verifiable proof and returns the corresponding amount of $BANG as confirmation. $BANG is currently only used for technical proof-of-concept and has no other practical use, but the 500 million quota was minted within 7.5 hours, with the 250 million on the GOAT Network chain being snapped up in just 2 hours.

Furthermore, according to DexScreener data, on NetSwap in Metis Andromeda, BANG currently has a market cap of $370,000, and the BANG–METIS pool liquidity has exceeded $155,000, reflecting the community's anticipation for the GMPayer AI Agent payment solution.

From the official website, GMPayer has already mapped out a clear path from solving a single problem to building a complex economy.

Currently, GMPayer is in its first phase, aiming to enable agents to independently pay for data and computing power through a multi-currency payment hub based on x402, creating real economic interactions between agents.

Next, GMPayer needs to achieve three major goals in stages.

• Make payments trustworthy and controllable, allowing users to safely grant small payment permissions, so agents can maintain control and budget limits during autonomous operation.

• Build an AI business network with DAT as the asset unit, making AI services truly tradable assets and promoting their transition from "tools" to a sustainable profit system.

• Ultimately become a universal value exchange layer, enabling any Web3 chain to seamlessly introduce AI into its application layer, achieving seamless interaction of AI, data, and services across all chains.

Through this path, LazAI and GMPayer are gradually turning the vision of the AI Agent economy from a technical concept into an operational and trustworthy real-world solution.

What are the core advantages of GMPayer?

GMPayer's strength lies in the fact that it is not an isolated technical implementation, but deeply mobilizes and integrates the high-quality resources of the entire Metis ecosystem, forming a set of comprehensive advantages that are significantly differentiated and difficult to simply replicate.

The most intuitive advantage of this solution is its flexibility in multi-chain and multi-currency payments. Through the collaboration of Metis, GOAT, and ZKM, GMPayer has built a cross-chain payment architecture that goes beyond single-chain experiments.

Specifically, Metis serves as the core for execution and settlement, ensuring the economic feasibility of microtransactions with its low fees and rapid finality; GOAT, as the native Bitcoin settlement layer, enables ultra-low-cost cross-chain flows of stablecoins and Bitcoin between Metis and the Bitcoin network through its zkRollup infrastructure and EIP-3009 support.

In addition to flexibility, the solution has a verifiable trust foundation, which is key to enabling permissionless transactions between unfamiliar AI agents. Traditional payment intermediaries require participants to give trust, but GMPayer fundamentally reshapes the trust model by leveraging ZKM's zero-knowledge proof technology. ZKM can verify the correctness of each payment's quotation, authorization, and payment payload, and generate verifiable proofs.

Ultimately, the realization of all these advantages relies on Metis's high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting high-frequency real-time payments. Hyperion provides the necessary throughput and low latency for high-frequency AI inference workloads and concurrent payment requests, ensuring smooth "highways" for payments; Andromeda, as the final asset anchoring and settlement layer, ensures the security and immutability of all transaction activities. This layered design of "Hyperion for processing efficiency, Andromeda for security" together provides a fast and stable runtime environment for AI Agent payment economic activities.

This synergy, based on a mature ecosystem and multi-faceted collaboration, means it offers not just a payment tool, but a robust, trustworthy, and vibrant foundational layer for the AI Agent economy.

Heavy investment in AI: Reshaping METIS's value logic

In addition to the major move of integrating the x402 protocol, the Metis ecosystem recently passed an important governance proposal on "ecosystem unification and economic model evolution."

After the proposal passed, the Metis ecosystem officially plans to move from the stage of layered construction to the stage of ecosystem synergy. Its settlement layer Andromeda, high-performance computing layer Hyperion, AI application layer LazAI, zero-knowledge proof layer ZKM, and Bitcoin L2 exploration layer GOAT will advance in coordinated development as a unified whole. The launch of GMPayer can be seen as the debut of this ecosystem synergy.

In addition, the Metis ecosystem has upgraded its token economic model, with METIS established as the native gas token of the LazAI network. This means that with the launch of applications like GMPayer, every AI Agent payment interaction, every data call, and every model inference will directly consume METIS. The ecosystem's activity is thus converted into real token demand, creating sustained value support for METIS.

In summary, METIS is no longer just the gas token for Layer2; it is becoming the core value carrier of the entire Metis ecosystem—all value generated in Andromeda, Hyperion, LazAI, and other layers ultimately converges and accumulates on METIS through gas consumption, staking governance, and ecosystem development.

Conclusion

The x402 protocol has opened up possibilities for the AI Agent economy, and the Metis ecosystem is turning it into an operational commercial foundation through GMPayer. However, this leap still faces many challenges: continuous optimization of system performance, industry adoption of technical standards, cross-chain security, and other key issues that need to be addressed. Overcoming these challenges will determine the actual progress of the AI Agent economy from proof-of-concept to large-scale application.