Plain Strata: The Third Rail
The Tuesday Pulse. For twenty-nine years, the web reserved a status code for payments, number 402, "Payment Required," and never once used it. This year two rival teams moved into that empty room two weeks apart. Coinbase's x402 answers a paywall in one shot: an agent pays a few cents in a stablecoin and gets its content, more than 160 million machine-to-machine payments since April. Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol answers the same code differently, opening a session an agent can draw against and settling in stablecoins, cards, or the Lightning Network, wired into 50-plus services in its…
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