Standards vs Protocols and Adoption Choices

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For decades, the internet has worked without a native way to pay for things. Credit cards were bolted on, platforms built their own integrations, and developers had to stitch together complex payment flows to charge even a few cents for anything.

But with AI agents now making requests, triggering actions, and needing to pay for data or services instantly, that old patchwork is starting to break.

In this episode, Laura Shin speaks with Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering for Coinbase’s Developer Platform, and Sam Ragsdale, founder of Merit Systems, about x402, a new open standard for internet-native payments designed for the AI era.

They discuss why AI has revived a decades-old idea, how x402 works under the hood, why devs say the experience is simpler than traditional payments, and how stablecoins make microtransactions economically viable. They also dive into the big debates: no chargebacks, chain-agnostic design, the shift to a foundation, and how this standard could eventually work with fiat as well.

Guests:

• Sam Ragsdale, Founder and CEO of Merit Systems

• Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform

Links:

• X402

• x402scan

• ERC-8004: Trustless Agents

• Payments MCP: Bringing Wallets, Onramps, and Payments to Every Agent

• Google Agentic Payments Protocol + x402: Agents Can Now Actually Pay Each Other

Timestamps:

• 🎙️ 0:00 Introduction

• 🌐 1:53 What x402 is—and the problem it finally solves for the internet

• 💳 7:06 How today’s payment rails work vs. how x402 reimagines them

• 🛠️ 9:06 Why Sam says the developer experience is “fundamentally better”

• 🔗 10:54 How x402 stays chain-agnostic

• 🧪 15:25 How Sam got into x402 and what x402scan enables

• 🚀 19:22 Some of the most interesting early use cases

• 🪄 23:05 How x402 works on the backend and why users shouldn’t see any of it

• 🏛️ 26:21 Why x402 is becoming a Foundation + the Cloudflare partnership

• 🔮 28:10 What the future of payments could look like in an AI-native world

• 💱 33:05 How x402 could also work with fiat, not just stablecoins

• 🆓 34:31 How the team is able to charge zero transaction fees

• ❓ 37:48 Whether x402 can fix the chargeback problem

• 🔌 42:57 Integrations: Payments MCP and Google A2A

• 🐶 45:28 How x402 is being used to buy memecoins, and other early apps Sam & Erik love

• 🤝 50:37 The challenge of reputation and trustless AI agents

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