Tag Archives: X402

Visa CLI and X402 CONVERGENCE

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Last week I wrote about MPP and x402 solving the internet’s original sin: the inability of machines to pay machines without a human in the loop. This week, Visa made that argument a lot easier to make.

Visa Crypto Labs quietly launched Visa CLI, a command line tool that gives AI agents a wallet. One npm install. One setup command. And your agent can pay for anything on the internet, charged to a real Visa card, without an API key, without a pre-funded crypto wallet, without human intervention.

I got beta access this week and tested it. Here’s what I learned, and why I think the CLI is the most important signal yet that the incumbent payment networks are serious about the agentic commerce era.

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The Evolution of Checkout: Invisible, Instant, and Everything In Between

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My friend Simon Taylor at Fintech Brainfood published a provocative piece this week: The Checkout is Dead, Part 2. His thesis is elegant — the future of agentic commerce is invisible. No cart. No confirmation screen. No “Pay Now” button. Just an event in the world, and money moves.

IMHO He’s right about the general direction. But he’s wrong about the scope and timeline. Not everything fits in instant, and its really important to look not only at OpenAI’s instant checkout FAILURE at Walmart, but also their internal success (ie Sparky driving 35% sales increase with internal checkout).

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

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Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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MPP (and X402) – Solving the Internet’s “Original Sin”

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Yes another agentic payment acronym. This one is important enough to remember. Where AP2 and ACP address agents acting on behalf of humans, X402 and MPP are about agents paying agents. My friend Simon Taylor just put together one of his all-time best posts on MPP and The Intention Layer. Today’s blog is a follow-up with a bit more of a comparison, and why this is a big deal from a payment and economic perspective. My key takeaways from Simon’s post

  • The “Skinny Master Account”: Taylor suggests that humans will grant “intent” (a budget and a goal) to an agent. MPP’s Session model perfectly mirrors this: a human “locks” $50 into a session (the intention), and the agent autonomously spends it in sub-cent increments (the execution).

  • The Substrate of AI: Taylor points out that AI thrives on Structured Text (Markdown). Ironically, legacy finance (ISO 8583, NACHA files) is essentially structured text. MPP acts as the “translator” between the agent’s markdown-based intentions and the rigid requirements of the global banking system.

  • The Outcome: The winner won’t be the protocol that is “most decentralized,” but the one that most effectively manages Trust and Permissioning. Stripe and Visa, as the incumbent trust-layers of the internet, are better positioned to solve the “Agentic Spend” problem than a pure-crypto protocol.

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X402 Foundation

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Short Blog

The x402 Foundation was publicly announced last week on September 23, 2025, as a joint initiative between Coinbase and Cloudflare. This effort aims to solve the governance issue in agentic. The design COULD SOLVE the governance issues outlined in Governance in Payments as well as last month’s Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance. As a refresh, my position is that monetization/governance is the Gordian knot preventing AI from moving to next stage of growth. 

While Google’s AP2 suffers from a dependency on settlement governance and the inability to expand trust beyond their own domain (see AP2 blog), x402 is just a standard that handles payment terms negotiations between two APIs (both price and method). The foundation turns x402 into a “network) with an operational model, active governance and economics. My example is that an existing customer would have payment managed with a current card on file and the merchant owning risk, whereas a new customer (or new machine request) could agree on a non-refundable stablecoin payment.  

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Google Rolls out Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) – Techie Blog

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Yesterday Google rolled out AP2. Key summary bullets

  • I applaud Google’s efforts to advance AP with first focus on enabling a “Trusted Agent Economy”. AP2 (V0.1) on establishing the core architecture and enabling the most common use cases (cards, data payloads to support VC, human in the loop scenarios with step up). 

  • Long list of supporting participants including MA and Amex. However, no other AI platforms, nor Visa, Paze, or US Banks. 

  • Good detailed documentation on initial flows (see Github)

  • Introduction of Verifiable Credentials (VC) as the core of AP2 with a recognition that merchants (who own risk) may also need transaction fraud data. 

  • A twist on the identity provider of VC to become the [Payment] Credential provider, with initial focus on cards, Google has stated goal of designing AP2 to support stablecoin, push payment and other payment types. This “sets up” Visa and Mastercard to retain their roles as the authentication infrastructure for the internet, while also allowing for other networks (India UPI) and seperate identity providers (eID) to operate with the role.

  • My read is that Google has given up hope of making AP2 work in US, as Visa’s intelligent commerce framework is further along.  How tokens, Issuers and networks work within AP2 is not a big technical effort, but there are several things missing from AP2, for example the rule sets (3DS, DAF, TAF, …etc) which the credential (and transaction) operates under. 

  • The framework is solid, authentication will be a huge part of the challenge here.  Payment networks must control how authentication is performed by with their credentials. Visa and mastercard are the authentication infrastructure for the internet for a reason. Its not the technology, it is the governance, standards, enforcement and the operating rules which govern WHO OWNS THE RISK when authentication has broken. See Identity Models and Governance https://blog.starpointllp.com/?p=6470 

  • Of course stablecoins could work here, but guess who owns the risk when something happened that wasn’t authorized? There is no bank to complain to.. Your automated agent made a mistake and you (the consumer) have the loss.

  • AP2 will be successful as the communication protocol for between agents and stakeholders, but it requires credential providers with strong governance and operating rule constructs. Visa, MA, Amex, UPI/UIDAS and PayPal all fit that bill.  The challenge with this dependency is that the control points for progress are complex, as any change in a network requires buy in from existing stakeholders.

  • Expect Google to demonstrate the technical efficacy of AP2 with Stablecoin or Crypto first, and then look to adapt AP2 needs to credential providers

  • While the EU is the best market for Google to begin with, regulators are not keen on doing anything to help US big tech. My recommendation to Google is work on a US focus plan B that will involve US credential providers (ie Visa and Visa banks). AP2 can be the protocol, but most of it will need to operate within the authentication and rules of the credential provider.

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