x402 Track: Crypto Rewrites the Story of Pay

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.

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.