This newspaper is also an API
Every article here is served three ways. Ask for HTML and you get a page. Ask for Markdown or JSON and you get the article with nothing wrapped around it. Here is how, and why we bothered.
Mara Okafor, . 4 min read
A wallet is not a reader
x402 tells a publisher that someone paid. It cannot tell them whether that someone is the same person who paid yesterday through a different agent, and that gap is where the business model lives.
Priya Raman, . 4 min read. 10¢
Why agents need paywalls too
Publishers built login walls to keep bots out. The bots your readers actually send are now the traffic worth letting in, and HTTP has had the status code for it since 1997.
Mara Okafor, . 4 min read
Publishers gate content behind logins and CAPTCHAs to keep unknown bots out. That works against scrapers. It also works against the agents your readers actually want to send: the research assistant summarising this morning's coverage, the procurement bot checking a supplier's press releases, the personal reader that a subscriber has pointed at your site because they no longer open a browser before nine.
Those agents are not the enemy. They are the reader, one step removed. But every mechanism a publisher has for telling friend from foe assumes a human on the other end. A login form wants a password typed by a person. A CAPTCHA wants a person to find the bicycles. A subscription wants a card and a billing address. None of that maps onto a program acting on somebody's behalf, and so the program gets treated like a scraper and turned away, or it gets through anyway and the publisher earns nothing.
What x402 actually does
A request, a 402, a signature, a settlement, a page. The whole protocol fits in four HTTP headers, and most of the interesting work happens in the one you never see.
Tobias Lindqvist, . 4 min read. 10¢
Who settles a ten-cent payment
The facilitator is the part of x402 that looks most like a payment processor, does the least, and has the most to compete on.
Tobias Lindqvist, . 4 min read. 5¢
Three free reads, without a login
The metered paywall is the most common model in publishing and the easiest to game. A reader credential makes it work for agents, and makes it harder to cheat than the cookie ever was.
Priya Raman, . 4 min read. 25¢
Thirty years of 402
HTTP reserved a status code for payment in 1997 and then left it empty. The history of why nobody used it is a history of what a payment needed to cost before a request could carry one.
Tobias Lindqvist, . 4 min read
- Payments
Paywalls, micropayments, and what changes when a request can settle its own bill.
- Identity
Who is on the other end of a request, and how a publisher can know without a login.
- Protocols
The wire formats, headers, and settlement flows underneath agent payments.
- Publishing
How a newsroom serves readers that are people and readers that are programs.
The Daily Agent covers the plumbing of the agent economy: HTTP 402 and x402 payments, reader identity, and publishing for machines as well as people. Every article is served as HTML, Markdown, and JSON.