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x402 isn’t good (yet) — Jan Curn, Apify
Takeaway
Agent payments unlock paid tools, but x402 adoption still requires realistic expectations about an emerging protocol.
Summary
- Apify describes a marketplace of roughly 45,000 tools and community payouts exceeding $1 million monthly.
- Its Coinbase launch exposed about 20,000 tools through x402, substantially expanding the available agent payment ecosystem.
- Curn argues that autonomous agents need budgets to complete longer tasks and that conventional payment fees make microtransactions impractical.
- He favors crypto rails for low-value machine payments and explains x402’s mandatory HTTP 402 payment-required exchange, while emphasizing the protocol is still immature.
x402agent-paymentsapify
Original description
Between the moment an x402 server verifies a payment signature and the moment it settles on the blockchain, nothing stops the buyer spending that money somewhere else. Jan Curn's point is that a client can mint a thousand signatures against one wallet, so any seller starting real work on the strength of a verification is exposed. The workaround is to do the work only after settlement, fine for a fixed price API call and awkward for anything slower. Curn is bullish enough on x402 to have shipped it two days before this talk, adding 20,000 Apify tools to a marketplace that previously carried about 2,000, and critical enough to spend the session on what it still gets wrong. He pitches it as a sequel to a talk here last year arguing that MCP was not good yet. The gaps compound. x402 wants HTTP 402 as the server's first response and MCP wants 401, and since one response cannot be both, companies stand up a second hostname purely for payments. Curn calls that an antipattern and asks how anyone would feel about a separate Amazon for every credit card. The original exact scheme charges a fixed fee per call, which does not fit tools that run for seconds or for hours, and the up to scheme meant to fix metered billing left the double spending window open anyway. Apify settled on charging in full and refunding the remainder, at the cost of a second chain transaction and a trust assumption pointing the wrong way. He is watching batch settlement, and has shipped a markdown page an agent reads to buy a prepaid token, deliberately not an API. Speaker info: https://x.com/jancurn / jancurn https://apify.com/jancurn Timestamps: 0:00 - A callback to "MCP isn't good yet" 2:02 - Apify's 45,000 tools, and 10x'ing the x402 catalog 4:47 - The standards pileup, from L402 to Agent Pay 5:39 - Why crypto fits agentic payments, disputes included 8:25 - A 30 year old status code finally picked up 9:19 - The x402 flow, and the double spending window 11:10 - When x402 wants a 402 and MCP wants a 401 12:59 - Exact, then "up to", and what it still did not fix 13:55 - Charging in full, refunding the rest, and batch settlement 16:38 - AGI, an agent general interface 19:26 - Where the volume actually is today