# The Daily Agent

> 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.

Every article is available as HTML at /articles/<slug>, as Markdown at /articles/<slug>.md, and as JSON at /articles/<slug>.json. The plain URL also honours the Accept header (text/markdown or application/json). A JSON index is at https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles.json. The Markdown links below return the full article with title, byline, date, and canonical URL at the top.

Articles marked with a price are paid. They answer 402 Payment Required with x402 terms in the PAYMENT-REQUIRED header (USDC on eip155:84532); retry with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header to receive the article. The price is the same for every representation. Unmarked articles are free.

## Payments

- [Why agents need paywalls too](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/why-agents-need-paywalls.md): 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, 30 September 2026)

## Identity

- [A wallet is not a reader](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/a-wallet-is-not-a-reader.md): 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, 25 September 2026) Price: $0.10.
- [Three free reads, without a login](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/three-free-reads-without-a-login.md): 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, 18 September 2026) Price: $0.25.

## Protocols

- [What x402 actually does](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/what-x402-actually-does.md): 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, 28 September 2026) Price: $0.10.
- [Who settles a ten-cent payment](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/who-settles-a-ten-cent-payment.md): 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, 22 September 2026) Price: $0.05.
- [Thirty years of 402](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/thirty-years-of-402.md): 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, 15 September 2026)

## Publishing

- [This newspaper is also an API](https://www.thedailyagent.news/articles/this-newspaper-is-also-an-api.md): 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, 29 September 2026)

## Optional

- [All articles in one document](https://www.thedailyagent.news/llms-full.txt): every article concatenated as Markdown
- [About the site](https://www.thedailyagent.news/about): what this publication is and how to read it as a program