What other entrepreneurial opportunities are there besides the blazing x402?

Original Article Title: x402 solves the original sin of the internet: ads
Original Article Author: @_0xaryan
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: In the era of the internet, content could only be sustained through the attention economy. However, as AI agents become the main information consumers, the advertising model will collapse, and blockchain enables "pay-per-view" microtransactions.

x402 is thus seen as a new paradigm: providing a unified on-chain payment interface for agents and content providers, allowing data exchange to return to transactional logic rather than attention grabbing.

The following is the original content:

The "Original Sin" of the Internet

For decades, online advertising has been the sole way the internet has survived.

Everyone is vying for attention. To do this, companies collect all possible data about you, build user profiles, and then show you ads.

In the internet world, this single business model has supported a market that is now worth tens of trillions of dollars.

In fact, financial mechanisms have existed since the birth of the internet: partnering with payment providers; setting up paywalls on websites; or displaying ads.

But microtransactions (less than $1) have always been economically infeasible—because Visa/Mastercard charge about 2% + $0.10 per transaction.

Therefore, advertising became the only viable model: users can access a large amount of content for free; advertisers can precisely target potential customers; content publishers can earn revenue. It was a balance that benefited all parties.

The Smart Agent Era

Agents are gradually becoming the main consumers of content, rather than humans themselves. They serve as "middleware," replacing humans in information retrieval and interaction.

The result is that advertisers can no longer directly target "humans"; the advertising ecosystem will collapse as a result.

In the future, agents will either "steal" (crawl) content or "purchase" content. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) will replace traditional browsers and become the default communication method of the internet.

User Journey

However, scraping content is not economically viable, so content creators will transition to charging micro payments for content access, requiring proxies to have a viable payment method.

For decades, micro payments have been unattainable—until the emergence of blockchain.

Blockchains like @solana have made large-scale, low-cost micro payments possible without "exploiting users."

The Emergence of x402

x402 is a standard built on the concept of the HTTP 402 status code ("Payment Required"), which:

Allows consumers to pay for content,

Enables content creators to charge fees,

Provides a unified interface without the need for intermediaries (such as Visa/Mastercard), making "proxied micro payments" a reality.

Source: payai.network

Any client (whether a proxy or a browser) sends a content access request, and the content host returns a "payment request," allowing the client to unlock the content upon payment completion.

This opens up a whole new economic model for the "Proxy Web."

Potential Use Cases

1. Gasless User Experience (Gasless UX)

x402 enables users to conduct gasless transactions on any network, simply by holding assets in their wallets.

2. x402 Browser

Someone should develop a native x402 browser based on a Chromium fork.

@brave is best positioned for this: it has a good reputation in the crypto community, includes a built-in wallet, and natively supports IPFS.

3. Onchain Bazaars

The discovery mechanism of traditional markets has barriers.

@CoinbaseDev partially addressed this issue through the "Bazaar" but these bazaars are still off-chain maintained.

An on-chain directory can be built to allow anyone to list their content for sale (APIs, newsletters, e-books, etc.),

and embed a rating system in the directory, similar to OpenRouter's way of sorting models.

4. Skip Ads Payment

Before x402 becomes widespread, an option to introduce "Paid Skip Ads" can serve as a transition.

Users set a daily spending limit, and when entering YouTube, the x402 browser automatically skips ads for you and pays the fee to the advertiser.

Whenever I see a simple technology that can give rise to a new economic system, I am amazed.

x402 is one such technology.

If you are building products in this field, whether as a seller or buyer, contact me — we are creating something new for you.

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