Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211
These past few days, I've been reading discussions about the x402 track, and I've noticed that most people are defining x402 using the logic of traditional payments, such as passively waiting for Cloudflare's promotion pace or worrying about the reliability of Google's support. This view is completely wrong, because when Pay meets Crypto, the story may be rewritten:
1) The ironclad rule that traditional payment channels are king on the seller side will not change. API sellers, as payment recipients, do indeed need CDN infrastructure giants like Cloudflare to drive this.
**It will leverage a top-down channel network, using a one-click x402 payment gateway to scale up the seller community to x402.** However, we can't just passively wait for Cloudflare. Crypto's first move in rewriting the Pay story was to use token incentives to gather sellers. There are many ways: for example, the Facilitator competition rewards API providers who integrate x402 with tokens; or some API brokerage platforms repackage traditional APIs as x402 compatible to profit from arbitrage and drive traditional sellers to authorize integration.** 2) On the buyer side, theoretically, there should be a group of agents with payment needs. However, the problem is that most agents don't have practical payment needs; they are either just chatbots calling APIs for free. What to do? The second blow to Crypto's story was filling the buyer gap with a wave of Launchpad token issuance. When a large number of agents with payment capabilities are generated, tokens are issued during payments, or there are opportunities to profit from transaction requests, naturally creating a large demand from "buyers." Even if a bubble exists, the infrastructure of the entire payment channel will certainly accelerate its prosperity in this process. 3) The logic of competition in Facilitator is the same. If the competition is only about payment channel coverage, the result will naturally be an infinitesimal approach to free services, and the commercialization ceiling for Facilitator will naturally be zero. But don't forget that Facilitator, as a key node facilitating payment behavior, can upgrade the "free channel" into a "traffic entrance" through token empowerment.
Facilitator ultimately boils down to the business logic of aggregating routing and distribution. Token cashback, token incentives, priority settlement, path recommendation, etc., could all become its new business models;
4) In traditional payment systems, Visa and MasterCard are merely infrastructure for collecting tolls, and most importantly, the market is basically monopolized. However, in the x402 sector, every x402 transaction will directly translate into ecosystem gain indicators such as on-chain TvL growth and Gas fee revenue. Therefore, it will inevitably bring about a wave of competition among multiple chains surrounding x402 infrastructure and tokens. While Base certainly possesses unique advantages, x402, as an open protocol, will become a highly contested area for many chains. For example, Base's creator economy can leverage x402 to quickly create blockbuster products; Solana's x402 hackathon is likely intended to reignite the second wave of AI agents; and Monad, as a high-concurrency performance chain, may see GameFi + x402 become its primary application scenario. That's all. Let me state my position first: I don't like Crypto's constant cycle of "asset issuance" bubbles. However, compared to the linear path of traditional payments—laying infrastructure first and then waiting for applications to gradually take off—Crypto will definitely use a flywheel model: first creating a false token boom, then using that boom to drive real applications. Do you understand? When Pay meets Crypto, it's not just the payment method that's changed, but the entire cold start logic.