Original title: x402 solves the original sin of the internet: ads

Original author: @_0xaryan

Original translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: In the internet age, content can only survive through the attention economy. However, as AI agents become the primary consumers of information, the advertising model will collapse, and blockchain makes "pay-per-view" micropayments possible.

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

The following is the original content:

The Internet’s “Original Sin”

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

Everyone is competing for your attention. To do this, companies collect every possible data about you, build a profile of you, and then show you ads.

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

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

But micropayments (less than $1) have never been economically viable - because Visa/Mastercard charges a fee of about 2% + $0.10 per transaction.

Therefore, advertising becomes the only viable model: users can access a large amount of content for free; advertisers can accurately reach potential customers; and content publishers can earn revenue. This is a balance that benefits all parties.

The era of intelligent agents

Agents are increasingly becoming the primary consumers of content, rather than humans themselves. They act as “middleware,” performing information reading and interaction on behalf of humans.

The result: advertisers can no longer directly target “humans”; the advertising economics system will collapse.

In the future, proxies will either "steal" (crawl) content or "buy" it. APIs (application programming interfaces) will replace traditional browsers as the default method of communication on the internet.

User Path

However, scraping content is not economically sustainable, so content publishers will turn to charging micropayments for access to their content, and proxies will need a viable payment method.

For decades, micropayments were impossible—until blockchain came along.

Blockchains like @solana make low-cost micropayments possible at scale without exploiting users.

The emergence of x402

x402 is a standard built on the concept of the HTTP 402 status code ("Payment Required"), which provides a unified interface for consumers to pay for content and publishers to collect fees without the need for intermediaries (such as Visa/Mastercard).

This makes "agentized micropayments" a reality.

Source: payai.network

Any client (whether it is a proxy or a browser) sends a content access request, and the content host returns a "payment request". After the client completes the payment, it can unlock the content.

This opens up a whole new economic form for the "Proxy Internet".

Potential application scenarios

1. Gasless UX

x402 allows users to perform gas-free transactions on any network, simply by holding assets in their wallet.

2. x402 browser

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

@brave is the best place to do this: it has a good reputation in the crypto community, has a built-in wallet, and supports IPFS by default.

3. Onchain Bazaars

There are barriers in the discovery mechanism of traditional markets.

@CoinbaseDev partially solved this problem with "Bazaar", but these markets are still maintained off-chain.

You can build an on-chain directory that allows anyone to list their content for sale (APIs, newsletters, e-books, etc.),

And embed a scoring system in the catalog, similar to how OpenRouter ranks models.

4. Skip Ads

Before x402 becomes popular, a "pay to skip ads" feature can be introduced as a transition.

Users set a daily spending limit, and when entering YouTube, the x402 browser automatically helps you skip ads and pay the fees to advertisers.

I am always amazed when I see how a simple technology can give rise to a new economic system.

x402 is one such technology.

If you’re building products in this space, either on the sell side or the buy side, reach out to me — we’re building something new for you.