Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, September 25th, and today we are talking about agentic payments and whether Ethereum is the future of finance. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the breakers discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, like I said, today we are kicking off with another update

in the world of agenic payments. Coinbase and Cloudflare have teamed up on a new payments

protocol for AI called X402. It's designed to allow AI agents to transact with each other directly, enabling machine-to-machine

commerce. Now, last week, we covered another AI payments protocol designed by Google in partnership

with Coinbase and a consortium of other supporters called AP2. AP2 was designed to solve the problems

inherent with AI-enabled e-commerce, in other words, situations where a user has instructed an AI agent to make a

purchase on their behalf. Now, this is certainly interesting in its own right, and it does work to solve

what is going to be a huge set of problems around introducing agents into the current e-commerce flows,

but it also falls way short of the classic crypto-industry vision of autonomous AI agents paying

each other without a human involved

in any way. X402 is a component of AP2 enabling agents to pay using crypto. Wednesday's news was

that Cloudflare has taken X402 and integrated it into OpenAI's agent software development kit

and the Model Context protocol, or MCP. MCP you can think of, kind of like an API for agents.

It's a protocol that allows agents to interact with various data sources.

In this case, MCP integration will act as a common interface so agents can use blockchain

payments networks.

Coinbase framed X402 as generally unlocking agent-to-agent, agent-to-business, and agent-to-user

payments.

Cloudflare gave the example that X402 can be used to allow agents to make purchases across multiple vendors, complete

micropayments for individual website visits, or power autonomous stock traders. One of the immediate

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