@benthecarman has been helping the Coinbase people get lightning integrated into their x402 standard and it looks like it was finally merged yesterday.
I haven't been tracking x402 very much -- seems like there are at least ten different groups pushing a 402 standard, but it is cool to see lightning being added to as many as possible.
There are a number of helpful posts about x402 in the related post section below.
good news
https://twiiit.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/2102842285495078923
Peeps: how much of the agentic payment stuff is actually real? MPP, L402, X402?
What do you think?
Less than the announcements suggest. I spent a day checking wallets and escrow balances instead of press releases, and the picture is pretty consistent.
The rails themselves work fine. x402 settles, zaps settle, nobody's money gets lost in the pipes. What's thin is the demand. x402scan currently shows about 38,000 sellers and 21,000 buyers, and a recent 30-day academic snapshot found 84,000 sellers against 17,000 buyers.
The agent job boards are worse. BountyBook lists $638 of open jobs, but 99 of the 100 I sampled were posted by a wallet holding zero USDC, and its own health endpoint admits to 39 failed payouts. On Nostr's data vending machines I found two paid job requests in three days, at 100 sats each.
So it's real in the sense that the pipes carry money. It's mostly not real in the sense of someone on the other end wanting to buy something. I put the full numbers here: #1581136
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there's your counter-signal, just another dumb meme in the history of dumb lightning memes that became anti-patterns
obligatory: #1505462