x402scan: The discovery layer for x402

Transcript

Okay, coming up now we'll have Shafu from Merit Systems who's a smart contract engineer with over 10 years of experience in development um and actually AI long before it was cool uh who's going to be joining us talking about the project that he's working on. We've all heard of X uh 402 and we all know there needs to be a way to index it and explore it. X402 scan is exactly that and we'll have uh Shafu joining us soon and talking about it. So let's please give him a big applause and start soon.

Good morning guys. Um, I'm Shafu. I work on Merit Systems and today I want to talk about X42 scan. If I can get up some slides. Thank you. So yeah, X42 scan is the discovery layer of X42. It's basically something like D5 Lama uh for DI or Ether Scan for uh for X42. It's like a block explorer for the X42 ecosystem.

So when we started looking into X42 uh a couple of weeks ago and maybe for context, X42 is a very very new thing. So the people at Coinbase, Eric um released the X42 spec in May and we started looking at X42 like seven eight weeks ago and what we saw uh was the following. We saw 50,000 transactions. I think half of them were like Coinbase integration tests. Um there was no central place to play around with X42 resources. There was also no analytics dashboards. There was

one DUNE dashboard but not more than that. So this is why we decided to build X42 scan. We released that in October and it's basically the home of X42 on the internet. So we list all X42 transactions. We list all resources, servers that expose X42, all the facilitators in X42, we show those as well. So on the left side here you can see how the scan looks like. you know, you have some overall statistics, all the top servers, and a bunch of other cool things.

So, the first thing I want to talk about is the X42 scan marketplace. And the marketplace is an abstraction we use around servers or origins that expose X42 resources. So on the left side here, on the right side here, you can see all the servers that expose X42 resources. And once you click into one of these servers, you get a list of all the X42 resources that this server exposes.

So for example, the SL token/burn endpoint, you could immediately play around with that from X42 scan. Uh we give you a server wallet or you can use your own injected wallet and you can just play around, pay for a resource, see what you get back and get a feeling for what X42 can actually do for you. We also show all the facilitators. Um the way we do that is we re rely on the community for this. Um, X42 is open source. People create facilitators. They create a pull request to add a new facilitator to the facilitators list.

Uh, you only need a bunch of metadata, the name of facilitator, the addresses, but once it's merged in, we automatically pick that up and start indexing all the X42 resources that come from that uh specific facilitator. Um maybe a bit of context here. The the role of the facilitator in X42 is to actually take the signature of the client and post that on chain. So the actual transaction happens in the facilitator. Um, which is a cool concept because you as someone who builds an application or business logic on your server. You don't need to deal with, you

know, like wallets, uh, nonsense, gas, all of that kind of stuff. You just rely on the facilitator to do the onchain work for you. I'm really excited about this. This is our composer which is basically an agentic platform where you can create agents that interact with X42 resources. Anyone can come in create an agent and give it access to specific X42 endpoints. So on the on the right side here you can see a list of all the agents we have and on the other side you can see how the composer actually looks

like. It's your typical chat interface, but what's special here? What's special here is that it has access to like the X42 superpower. So here, for example, the agent uh has access to that endpoint, pays seven cents for it, gets back the response, and uses that for the next answer, and puts that into its own context. Um, why I'm so excited about this is because I think this could be the first step into what a lot of people call agentic commerce whereas basically you have something like chat GPT and it roams around the internet and it hits a lot of free APIs which is great but

currently it would hit a paid API and would be basically stuck. Just imagine your agent goes to the New York Times, hits a pay wall, it cannot pay for it, and it's just stuck. With X42, if someone like the New York Times would expose X42 on their website, the agent would go there, pay like 5 cents to get access to that article and and uses that uh to give back a response to the user. One big problem and the previous panel uh talked a little bit about that is uh reputation. Um what's great about X42 is it's totally permissionless. Anyone can

create an X42 resource which is fantastic. At the same point, a lot of them just don't work right. If anyone can create one, you have a lot that just do something else or are even malicious. Um so this is what I call like the reputation problem and the way we try to solve the reputation problem and X42 scan is by giving each resource each origin a reputation score and that reputation score is an aggregation of a couple of things that we a couple of data points that we collect. So things like uptime, latency, number of transactions, volume, we have all of

that data because the X42 calls that happen through X42 scan go through our proxy and we use these data points to create an aggregated score. So for example here you can see it has an uptime of 100% the latencies, number of requests, um number of successful calls and so on and so forth. And this is basically like a reputa like a resource with like a green reputation. It's it's a good endpoint. Um where this is particularly exciting is for agents. Um the agent has its own wallet. It's going to spend your money. So you want it to use resources that are actually good,

right? So what you can do with that reputation score is you can tell the agent, hey agent, just use resources that have a reputation score of like eight out of 10 or something like that. If it's below that, just ignore it, never use it, never touch it. We have these observability dashboards where this is very cool for people that actually want to debug their resources. We have that for origins, resources and facilitators as well. You can see if an error happens, you can click into that.

You can see why it happens. You can see all the status codes that it returns and so on and so forth. This gives you like a bird eye view over everything in X that happens X42. So we launched X42 scan and uh this happens. uh we got a lot of eyes on it which is uh very exciting. Um at the same time this happened because someone had the genius idea of launching an X42 memecoin. Um I guess we're in crypto that kind of stuff happened. Um it's super good to get all the attention on this. Um, but I think we're at a point where we actually need need like great

X42 native resources, right? So the question I always ask myself is what what is possible now with X42 that wasn't possible before and um I think the memecoin mania is not sustain sustainable. So let's build actual useful X42 resources. I'm really proud of this. X42 scan is completely open source. It's not only the front end that's open source, it's the indexer, it's the syncer, it's the proxy, everything is inside that monor repo. Um, I think this is particularly cool because just imagine like I love

etherscan. I think etherscan is great. Just imagine etherscan was open source. Um the amount of innovation you would see there it would would be completely different. Um I I know they have their business model but I think this is uh this is super cool. So yeah it's open source. Come build with us. I think we have like this screenshot is a bit old. I think we have over 30 contributors at this point. Only seven out of 30 are from our team from the merit team. Um, we also have another product at Merit which is called the terminal which you can see right there. It's basically a way to fund open-source projects to pay contributors and of course we use that

on our own thing. So we have a bunch of bounties there. Come work with us. You can even earn some money. So yeah, maybe lastly, what's the vision? What am I uh really excited about? Um I think X42 has the potential to kill ads on the internet, which you know, personally I don't like ads that much, but it was just the only sustainable way to to monetize the internet previously. It's like in the past you paid with your attention. With X42, you just pay with your wallet. You know, instead of getting YouTube

Premium, you pay 2 cents to watch a video without ads. Instead of getting a New York Times subscription, you pay 4 cents to access a access an article. I think that's super cool. Um, the second one is agentic commerce. I think X42 is perfect for that. It uniquely enables that. It's one standard for all agents to interact with paid endpoints on the internet. Um, huge huge potential. The other thing which is cool, A16Z put that out recently where they're like the potential market for X42 is the whole internet. So it's basically trillions big number but could be a very big thing.

So yeah, what's next? Um V2 was finalized I think last week. This is from the X42 Coinbase repo. Shout out to the guys at Coinbase for doing it all in the open. So uh you can join you can join the see the discussion there add to maybe V2 is finalized now but maybe add something to V3 um but yeah it's still very early we have a lot of things that you can contribute to um I think privacy is a big thing you know make X42 private uh reputation is a big thing supporting multi-tokens multi-chain like currently uh on X42 scan we only show USDC

transactions. So, it would be cool to get some other tokens there. Um, I think discoverability is cool. Indexing, you know, just write some good docs. Uh, make some good tutorials. It's all very, very early. So, yeah, thank you guys. Uh, let's, you know, let's grow the pie. Let's make X42 100x from here. And, uh, yeah, thanks for listening. Okay, >> moving now to the Q&A session. If you have any questions, please raise your hand and our volunteer is going to give you the mic. We have a question there.

Hello. Um I have a question that is like how do you it's a two-part question. So the first one will be you see X42 working for resources that are currently paid but uh in in a web format that requires the user to go through a credit card flow. you see X42 replacing the flow. And the other one is like what do you see as the consumption factor of an agent using X42? Is it like an MCP wallet on like cloud code or a little bit more about like how you see the product being consumed? >> Yeah. Could you repeat the second question?

>> The second is like the form factor in which people will be paying for resources uh through X42. Is it like my cloud code session having a wallet that I can hit some APIs that are paid or what is like the >> No. Yeah, it's a good question. I think so currently how we do that uh you know I showed the composer. It's basically the agent has its own wallet. So you know you fund your agent with a 10 USDC agent pays for things goes back to you. Um because the agent has its own wallet and can spend money. This is why I think reputation is super important. Um, but other than that, I think it's like an embedded wallet where you know, you have an embedded wallet in your browser or

something. But I think like from from UX from UX standpoint, it would be very bad if you need to, you know, approve every time you know your agent or yourself are trying to uh trying to access X42. And what was your first question again? The first question is if you see a place for X42 to basically provide a payment alternative for current resources that are paid through regular Stripe uh flows. >> Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. Um I think from a from a like from a consumer, you know, if it's like a human um I don't know. I think it's very very cool for agents. I think it's perfect for agents um for you know I go to a

website and instead of signing in with Google O I pay with my wallets Rex 402 I don't know it's like not a 10x improvement but I think for agent it is but yeah thanks for your questions >> thank you another one there we have one hand there >> thanks a lot for the uh the panel uh my question is uh uh uh the X402 now it's a settlement layer but uh how about the discovery uh layer for like given we already have the repetition layer from uh URC74 whether the uh facilitator they going to um served as a search hub uh and u uh even I heard some bad word like

uh AEO just like go so that in the future we want to find a better way to promote your own agent there are some you know new business model around this how do you think about this So your question is how discovering >> how do agent agents discover X42 resources. >> Yes. And whether the facilitator of X402 can served as a hub of the discoverability. >> Oh yes. Yes. Well, I hope it's going to turn out into that. It's uh I think the the bigger vision for X42 scan is, you know, to become like the Google of X42, something like that, but not for humans but for agents, right? So maybe we expose like an X42 indexing resource

where where the agent is like hey I'm actually not sure which X42 resources I need to use. So they come to our endpoint pay like 10 cents to get the answer which resource they need to hit. Um yeah maybe we should build that. It's a good idea. And one more feature request uh as we are a marketplace for agents, we need a payment stability payment features because uh when some users use the agent on our platform uh I I hope the owners of the agents can get paid but at the same time the marketplace can also get paid. So uh whether in your uh pipeline you have this new features in the >> like what's the business model? How do >> split uh the payment because we are a marketplace right? We create agent. My

users create agent and others use this agent. They make payment through X402 to the agent owner. >> Yeah. >> But we are I mean we are the platform. We own a lot of data and facilitation to them. And we also want to get paid. >> So in one single payment we we hope it can be split into two main uh two payment. One is to the owner of the agent another payment is to us as a platform >> as a facilitator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. That's interesting. So hope we can have this features in the upcoming version.

>> Okay. Um we have time for one quick question and then we're going to end it. >> I think yeah we have it here in the front. >> Hey so like we are building a AA agent that's called Dobby. And I have a question. Is the X402 protocol open to open the gates to the agent to machine economy? It's like that compatible with X402 >> with the what economy? >> Agent to matching. >> Agent to what? >> Matching. >> Matching.

>> Machine. Yeah. With devices, IoT, things like that. >> I don't know the agent to matching. >> Machine. >> Oh, machine. Machine. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Okay. Um, is the expert to Okay. Agent to machine. Uh, what do you mean by machine? Asian to machine >> like an IoT device like an EV charger or >> Oh, okay. Okay. So, yeah, if your IoT device is like, "Hey, pay me pay me 1 cent to get like the it measures the temperature or something and exposes that, it would be perfect."

>> Okay, thank you. >> Yeah, it's actually a good idea. It's like, you know, pay for a GPU or pay for some sensors or stuff like that. >> Yeah, thanks for your question. Okay, that's all. Let's give a big applause to Shafu. >> Thank you guys. [applause]