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
All articles
7 articles, newest first. Also printed as JSON and as llms.txt.
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
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¢
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¢
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