What's the easiest way to do this with a stablecoin?

When I looked at USDC recently at the end of the tutorial I was following there was a throw way "and don't forget you need ethercoin too, to pay the gas transaction fee." That was after all the warnings about not sending to the wrong address or block chain. (Stable coins are on a bunch of block chains and apparently you are required to manually ensure the sender and receiver are on the same chain, otherwise your coins go bye bye)

What's the point of I need a bunch of other coins and it's so complicated? This complexity and required tinkering seems like the kind of thing cryptocurrency nerds love, but is too complicated for someone just trying to make a payment.

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solumos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What's the easiest way to do this with a stablecoin?

You give a crypto wallet to an AI agent, and make sure it has some USDC.

> What's the point of I need a bunch of other coins and it's so complicated?

The point is that the CDP team built something that fits one of Coinbase's narratives du jour — agentic payments. It's simply a protocol for agentic payments. The team that built it doesn't even really know how it _should_ work or what the actual use cases are — but wouldn't it be cool if your AI agent had a crypto wallet, and instead of the agent getting pay-walled, they could just pay for stuff?

> This complexity and required tinkering seems like the kind of thing cryptocurrency nerds love, but is too complicated for someone just trying to make a payment.

I think that's a fair criticism. The Bridge/Privy/Stripe approach is wildly different, and focuses more on current problems.

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Karrot_Kream 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

USDC is also available on Solana and there's fees there too but they're pretty infentessimal. I've sent USDC from Coinbase to my Solana wallet and haven't had to pay any fees, so I presume it's not high enough for Coinbase to bother charging anyone.

As far as addresses, yeah there's no way to avoid this. When you send cryptocurrency there's no real way to ensure that a wallet exists at the receiver's address nor that the person you want to reach is at this address, so you need to be careful that you are using the correct address. Ethereum uses ENS addresses to help deal with this.

In that way this is a lot like a wire transfer in the US. If you use the wrong account or routing number then you're basically SOL. There's some verification you can do with receiver names but if your recipient is just at some bank and only the bank name comes up there's not much you can do.

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Seattle3503 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I understand that if someone generates a key then burns it, there's no way to know. But it was shocking for me to realize that there doesn't seem to be a universal mechanism to ensure you are sending something to *the correct blockchain*. The sender should know what chain their coins are on, so if the recipient embeds that metadata in the address or QR code, some basic validation should be possible.

In L2 it seems like a "handshake" should be possible as well. Eg Where the sender sends in infinitesimal amount of coins, and the recipient moves the funds in a way the sender can see, so the sender knows the funds sent were accessible.

	▲	Karrot_Kream an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Huh interesting idea. You could probably build something like this on Solana or the EVM directly. The thing is, if you get the address of the recipient wrong, how can you tell? Like if I send SOL to a payee, then I can look at the chain to make sure that SOL was sent from my address to the payee's address. But that doesn't change the fact that I don't know if the payee is who I think it is. Are you thinking about situations where, say, you meet in person, then send an amount and have the recipient verify they received an amount, then send the rest? Like a multi-party escrow? Third-party escrow contracts are very common.

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__erik 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

x402 abstracts away gas! You can try here from a human use standpoint: https://www.x402.org/protected And you can see how to accept stablecoins or spend in the the examples https://github.com/coinbase/x402/tree/main/examples/typescri... https://github.com/coinbase/x402/blob/main/examples/typescri...

	▲	Seattle3503 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting. I couldn't get that working with Coinbase wallet or Metamask from FF on Android. Is there a contract structure that obviates the need for Ether, or in there somewhere am I buying ether and USDC from somewhere and I just don't see that interaction?