A couple of days ago, I saw something quite interesting. There's a guy called AlphaRaccoon who made over a million dollars in 24 hours on Polymarket by betting on the Google annual search rankings—guessing 22 out of 23 events correctly. Everyone was shouting about insider trading, but to be honest, prediction markets are basically "information harvesting fields"—whoever has more information wins, it's never about who can analyze better.

But today, I want to talk about x402, not Polymarket. I call it the "Alipay for AI," but it's more powerful than Alipay: it allows AI agents to spend money themselves.

Imagine this: AI calls an API, costs $0.001 per call, paid with a credit card? The transaction fee starts at $0.3, which is a pure loss. x402 turns that ignored HTTP 402 error code into a payment channel. When AI requests data, the server directly returns a payment code. With USDC, the transfer costs less than one ten-thousandth of a dollar, and it's done in a second.

V2 is even more impressive: multi-chain switching at will, the ability to batch pay bills, and even connect to bank cards. In simple terms, it's upgrading from "paying one by one" to "issuing a no-password black card to AI."

What's the significance of this? In the future, AI agents will handle orders, purchase computing power, and buy data without human intervention. This is the real infrastructure that will enable the AI economy to take off.

Infrastructure first, applications later. You've seen this logic countless times in the crypto space.