Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
The year 2025 is about to enter its summary phase. I initially thought that this year the crypto industry would conclude with key plot points such as Bitcoin not outperforming gold, the overall weakness of the meme market, Wall Street collectively embracing DAT, Binance's overwhelming influence, and the Trump family becoming the biggest winners in crypto. To my surprise, the end of the year still sees a resurgence of the crypto AI narrative.
On October 18, the AI trading competition organized by the financial market-focused AI lab nof1 sparked massive attention towards AI in the market this year. Six mainstream AI models engaged in real crypto trading on Hyperliquid with an initial fund of $10,000. This competition not only reignited the crypto community's imagination about "AI trading," but also successfully attracted attention from the AI industry.
Within a week, the first token issued through the x402 protocol, PING, made a significant impact, with the phrase "possibly replicating the 2023 inscription craze" boosting its market cap from $0 to $80 million in just a few days. The wealth effect also caused a surge in interest in the x402 protocol, which helps AI agents achieve autonomous internet payments, reigniting the market's enthusiasm for AI+Crypto narratives, such as the AI agent economy and the era of internet micropayments.
According to CoinGecko data, the overall market cap of the x402 ecosystem has exceeded $8.14 billion, growing by 186.8% in just the past 24 hours.
Such a spectacle not only reminds one of the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm in the crypto industry in 2024, but coincidentally, that explosion also occurred at the end of the year. The first AI autonomous agent token, GOAT, reshaped the market's perception of the AI+Crypto combination, and the "great debate" scene among AI frameworks like ai16z Eliza, swarms, and GAME is still fresh in memory. Various specialized and domain-specific AI Agent narratives were abundant, but these have now become a thing of the past.
So, how long will this wave, led by the x402 protocol and centered around the narrative of AI agents achieving autonomous payments, last?
Has AI hype progressed compared to 2024?
In the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm in 2024, although the AI robot truth terminal opened Pandora's box, subsequent market speculation mainly focused on AI frameworks and certain specialized AI agents, such as on-chain trading agents, DeFi agents, live streaming agents, metaverse agents, and payment agents.
During the peak of market sentiment, both AI frameworks and specialized AI agents saw their prices fully speculated, with mainstream AI frameworks like ai16z having market expectations reaching even tens of billions of dollars (which has not been realized today). Although the bubble of AI Agents eventually burst and speculators exited one after another, some investors still believe that AI Agents represent a track with significant growth potential in the crypto field. Speculation may stop, bubbles may burst, and attention may wane, but as long as the infrastructure and application projects for AI Agents continue to be built, a second wave of explosion will surely come, and it will be even more intense than the first.
"Sell in a bull market, build in a bear market" has always been the consensus among believers in cyclical theory.
At the same time, whether it is AI autonomous payment tools that facilitate transactions or applications that support commercial transactions between agents, many infrastructures and specific projects were already being built during the first wave of AI Agent speculation in 2024, and investors believed these could be one of the fields to explode in 2025. However, the current x402 protocol's surge is not built on the infrastructure of the first wave of AI Agent speculation in 2024. In short, while the narrative of AI autonomous trading has remained consistent from 2024 to now, the technologies and infrastructures of the two phases have no connection.
The x402 protocol was launched by Coinbase in May 2025, aiming to enable AI agents to make instant stablecoin payments directly via HTTP. If we trace back further, Coinbase was already developing autonomous trading for AI agents in 2024 _([Related reading: _AI for AI trading? Understanding Coinbase's facilitation of the first AI agent crypto trading event)], and the core status code used in the x402 protocol, 402, can be traced back to Tim Berners-Lee's original design of the HTTP protocol in the 1990s, where Coinbase enabled this status code that signifies "payment required."
Thus, it appears that the x402 protocol does not have a significant technical barrier; what is precious is the moment of "inspiration" that decided to introduce the 402 status code into the AI agent economy. This approach is simple and elegant, solving the value exchange problem for AI agents with just a few lines of code, perfectly integrating with Crypto, and challenging the existing internet payment model.
Compared to the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm in 2024, it is hard to say that this current AI hype led by the x402 protocol has leveraged any advantages. While the narratives overlap to some extent, both the infrastructure and related applications have been innovated, and the technology and infrastructure are being restructured, with applications still in their early stages.
The Same Problem: Too Early
One of the reasons the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm in 2024 could not sustain itself after the speculation was the lack of product-market fit (PMF). Neither AI frameworks nor practical AI agents like DeFi agents found a stable business model and user base. On one hand, investors believed in the attractive narrative shaped by AI+Crypto, but on the other hand, the track has always been in its early stages, with unfriendly product experiences and ideal visions that could not be realized. Speculators could not convert to users, ultimately leading to a mess.
x402 faces the same issue; while the narrative of AI autonomous payments is indeed attractive, is it really the "right time" recognized by users now? According to x402scan data, the total payment volume in the x402 protocol ecosystem is only $2.153 million, serving only 99,300 buyers and supporting just 8,051 sellers of paid services. Meanwhile, the overall market cap of the x402 protocol has already exceeded $8 billion, a market supported by fewer than 100,000 users, with the market cap seriously decoupled from actual usage.
Of course, the speed of market sentiment spreading is always faster than the market's actual development. The x402 protocol is in its early stages, and we can say it has a long way to go, but when the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm occurred in 2024, we said the same thing, that the future is vast. What was the result? People personally pushed it into ruins, and now they are starting to rebuild.
A victory for IQ 100
Making money is the primary goal for every crypto investor, but when a narrative heats up quickly, most people promote its enormous potential and teach you how to seize opportunities and jump in, while very few will tell you when to exit. In a crypto market dominated by speculation, most of the time we are trading on emotions, and emotions are fleeting, leaving no room for hesitation or doubt. At the same time, as new funds entering the crypto market decrease and traditional finance focuses on DAT, RWA, stablecoins, etc., the environment for the crypto native market, which is left with only existing funds, has worsened. With a major hotspot every week and a minor one every three days, only those with IQ 50 and IQ 150 can profit in this market environment, while ordinary investors with IQ 100 find themselves at a loss.
However, the emergence of the x402 protocol has given everyone hope. Although the x402 protocol's hype is not built on the first wave of AI Agent enthusiasm, the broader direction of AI+Crypto remains one of the mainstream trends, and the x402 ecosystem still has the opportunity to become a towering structure.
The wealth effect of the meme coin PING has attracted market attention and funds to the x402 ecosystem, but the market has not continued to speculate on hollow meme coins; instead, it has shifted its focus to specific projects with fundamentals, such as PayAI, Daydreams, Kite AI, Unibase, etc. PING has already fulfilled its historical mission, and perhaps in the future, people will look back and see that the x402 ecosystem has shifted from speculation to practicality.
This may be a victory for IQ 100, as x402 will recreate the wealth-building spectacle of AI at the end of 2024. Ordinary investors can now follow familiar patterns to decide whether to buy or sell a particular asset, analyzing projects, comparing the pros and cons of different technical solutions, and determining whether to trade based on the actual product delivery and future vision of the team, rather than tracking on-chain leaders, believing in so-called conspiracy groups, or surrounding crypto celebrities for a tweet.
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