x402 Thesis x402 acts as the payment rails for microservices — yes... this is only the rail that enables to seamlessly pay other agents using stablecoins In order to have a full agentic economy, you need auxiliary infrastructure, quality services, and trust/verifiability layer for the agents to understand who they can trust for the services. You also need an entire commerce layer designed for pay-per-use, per-result, per-second which requires - Tracking what work was done - Calculates how much it costs - Settle it instantly - Make sure the agents who pay get the results - Attribute the high quality result to the right agents and - Establishes the history of work/quality of services for the agents @Nevermined_ai is building the atomic commerce layer for AI agents (focusing on billing infra — Paypal for AI) @virtuals_io is building ACP starting with Virtuals agents (focusing on agent registry, evaluation of work between agents, reputation) @ethereum is establishing Ethereum as the trust & settlement layer with ERC-8004 @eigenlayer is building verifiability stack with EigenAI to make AI agents inference verifiable and non-deterministic (mitigate hallucinations) On top of these infra, we need > Facilitators: helping offload blockchain-related heavy tasks (gas fees, wallet management, execution, settlement) for service sellers and customers > Specialized agents/quality service providers: Know how to offer good services > Orchestrators: Know which specialized agents are good for the job, and know what needs to be done > Middleware: SDKs, APIs, and toolkits that enable developers to easily plug x402 into apps/agents without custom code. a16z latest report forecasted $30T in TAM for the agentic economy. This is quite a far away future where we need these modular infrastructure to fall into place. Which part of the stack accrues the most value? Short-term — orchestrators which act as the front-end GPT interface or workflow builders + highly-specialized AI agents who're really good for their job The best crypto AI use cases that we've seen fall into 3 categories (i) Trading (ii) Prediction (iii) Defi Given the surge in hype & adoption for x402, leaders within these 3 categories will be able to 10x their users and revenue once the stack is built out. In a similar fashion to human users using launchpads (like Pumpfun) as the front end to ape into tokens, Orchestrators will act as the front end aggregating and orchestrating high quality/high demand services to users (getting a piece of the cut along the way). How does this tie in with Crypto AI Agents? Although it's going to take a while for x402 stack to get built out, the AI agent narrative is back — AI agent ecosystem leaders are recovering their losses and smaller AI agent plays are rebounding 200-1000%+ during the past week. Similar to the previous run, this run up is mostly fueled by speculation from the x402 memecoin trench side of things. Most of these agent plays won't be able to sustain its gains. Only some whose products are fleshed out or close to commercialization stage will survive. Might do a dedicated article on the State of AI agent Q4/2025 soon to share the change I've observed in the market since the last AI agent run in Q1/2025 In the mean time, if you're looking to learn more about x402, check the After Hour EP.26 out. Link in my bio. Anyway, thanks for checking this out. Super glad people care about Crypto AI again lol.