I implemented x402 across a very heavily crawled site and have yet to see any transactions go through. Possibly it's not working, but I haven't seen any yet. Reading the x402 reddit you see other similar comments. People joking that the only people putting money into x402 are the people testing to see if x402 works.

I do want it to work, so just curious does anyone have any positive anecdotes? Can this naturally get picked up by crawlers?

Why would any scraper choose to pay you? They have previously been able to scrape your content for free and can continue to scrape your content for free.

The problem was never the lack of a way to pay you, they just don't care if the transaction is fair.

I believe having Ai agents using credit-based Saas without needing a subscription with each of those Saas individually (just access to a wallet with some allotment) is the overall compelling use case.

Never heard of a use case. But wild speculation is fun - it seems very unlikely that crawlers will be the first one.

- The per-API-call return probably needs to be fairly high with obvious value to justify paying for something. Downloading a .tar.gz of the site, rather than a crawler.

- The world seems to be reforming political blocks, so it'll likely be a cross-bloc transaction where the two sides don't have a fiat transfer system available for use.

- Probably something that is politically sensitive in the customer's bloc.

So my guess would be that the first use case will be some illegal service that could have been implemented with an AWS Lambda, probably hosted somewhere questionable (Russia a candidate). Probably branching out into politically sensitive topics.

> People joking that the only people putting money into x402 are the people testing to see if x402 works.

It'll be that way until suddenly it works for someone, like how bitcoin was a joke up until some tipping point where the financiers started moving in. It'll take a big kick initially to convince people figuring out crypto is worth it just for the sake of making a web trade.

Its a technical solution to a non existing problem.

99% of the big companies provide a standardized known way of paying stuff everyone is used to use.

Its a credit card.

Whatever happens somehow in the background, no one cares.

I have a service[0] to resolve financial data for tickers for agents which uses x402. I've seen payments come through every now and then, so while it's not super mainstream, I believe it does work and get's used. Agentic Market[1] is full of such services.

[0] https://filedge.io [1] https://agentic.market

They tried it before with BAT. I ended up getting a few cents on a website with 1M unique/month.

As a buyer it’s very handy for handling agent web search tool calls, because it require no login, account management, etc. I’ve got all my local agents set up this way currently.

I think it will boil down to find out how many people out there are not willing to trust their agent with their credit card but are willing to give it a prepaid debit card - which effectively it's what Coinbase is providing, but dressing it as cryptocurrency.

It also means that if this starts getting any traction, then we could expect to start a nice bump in prepaid debit card adoption.

Nah, they don't want you to earn anything. End of story.

> I do want it to work, so just curious does anyone have any positive anecdotes? Can this naturally get picked up by crawlers?

Eeh, have you find any crawler software that actually supports that protocol? I've seen lots of websites implementing support for it, but do people really implement support for a protocol before they see user-agents who could technically use it? If you're seen those user-agents, which ones are they?

Arguably it is too late, industrial scale piracy of user input demands a hapless data-entry caste. Even with the new content origin obfuscation attempts, watermarking, and 3rd world human content moderators.

No one is willingly going to tack on a variable cost to their business revenue model. At best, the crawlers/users will simply skip your hosts, or operate in places where gleaning data is still perfectly legal. =3

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