Written by: Yue Xiaoyu

1. What is the most important thing in building a payment ecosystem?

It is actually the merchant ecosystem, which means that we need to enrich the supply side first in order to attract more demand.

To draw an analogy, the emergence of Alipay was preceded by the Taobao platform, which was created to solve payment issues.

In other words, electronic payments became widely popular due to the emergence and prosperity of e-commerce platforms.

The popularity of Alipay was not due to superior technology, but because the merchant ecosystem of Taobao (supply) drove the demand.

2. AI-native payments also face cold start challenges

The previously popular x402 is a very simple and pure AI-native payment protocol that mainly addresses AI payment issues.

When developing its ecosystem, x402 faced the same problems that electronic payments encountered at their inception: Where is the market? Who are the merchants? Who will supply the goods?

Now, in the x402 payment ecosystem, the largest seller has emerged: the decentralized data provider Switchboard.

Switchboard is an oracle and currently the first and only decentralized data source in the x402 ecosystem that supports pay-per-use access.

In simple terms, x402 allows AI Agents to easily purchase data, and Switchboard is the seller of high-quality, real-time data, utilizing x402 to collect micropayments.

3. Switchboard is the "Taobao moment" of the x402 payment ecosystem!

Just as Taobao first gathered a massive number of merchants, Switchboard has provided a rich and reliable supply of paid data to attract the first batch of AI Agents for testing.

Switchboard uses x402 to list all data sources for sale: AI Agent sends a request → server returns 402 → Agent automatically pays on-chain → instantly receives the data.

This creates a flywheel: Switchboard's supply attracts AI Agents (demand) → transaction volume increases → more sellers follow x402 → ecosystem flourishes.

4. In a payment ecosystem, supply must come first!

To build a payment ecosystem, we need to first establish Taobao, enrich merchants, and activate supply.

x402 + Switchboard essentially perfectly replicates Alipay + Taobao: the protocol provides the tools, and the supply side (data sellers) provides the market.

a16z estimates the x402 market to reach $30T, and Switchboard, as a pioneering data market, has the opportunity to capture a significant share of the data layer.

We can continue to keep an eye on the latest developments in the x402 ecosystem.

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