After the launch of the X402 protocol, especially with the introduction of the PING meme coin, there was a significant influx of capital.

When I first saw this situation, I was quite worried: particularly concerned that this emerging sector would be flooded with various meme coins, ultimately attracting a large number of speculators rather than builders.

Fortunately, in the following days, it seems that the hype around meme coins gradually cooled down, and what replaced it was the construction and advancement of various infrastructures in this sector.

Among the various infrastructures being promoted, I am currently paying more attention to the facilitator.

Regarding the facilitator, I will quote the words of Coinbase, the initiator of the X402 protocol (details can be found in the reference link at the end):

The original text translates to: It is an optional but recommended service. It is responsible for simplifying the payment verification and settlement process between customers and merchants.

In simpler terms, it can provide a better user experience by simplifying the cumbersome payment and settlement steps that users have to engage in.

For example, when we are playing a blockchain game, if completing an action requires multiple on-chain transactions, each transaction will pop up a payment/verification interface, and we have to click to complete the payment/verification action.

This experience is truly terrible.

But with the facilitator, leveraging the protocol support of Ethereum itself, we can authorize a certain amount of funds to this facilitator, allowing it to complete payments/verification directly in the background from our wallet without requiring our confirmation each time, within the authorized limit.

This way, we can achieve a service experience similar to that of traditional internet services.

In a previous article, I shared my views on future on-chain payment behaviors. I believe that in the AI era, there are three main types of payment behaviors:

• Encrypted payments between humans
• Encrypted payments between humans and AI Agents
• Encrypted payments between AI Agents

Among these three types, I believe that the third type (i.e., encrypted payments between AI Agents) does not actually require X402 and can be fully completed through pure on-chain actions.

The so-called user experience problem that the facilitator aims to solve is cumbersome and error-prone for humans, but it is trivial for AI Agents and is hardly a barrier.

Therefore, the X402 protocol and the facilitator infrastructure derived from it are essentially addressing human issues, with the largest potential service target being humans, primarily covering the first two types of payment behaviors.

After understanding the role of the facilitator, I instinctively began to pay attention to whether there are centralization issues associated with it.

From https://www.x402scan.com/facilitators, we can see that the current top four facilitators ranked by transaction volume are: Coinbase, PayAI, and Heurist. In terms of transaction amount, the top three are PayAI, Dexter, and Coinbase.

In this case, I estimate that many (human) users will default to choosing these service providers when using X402.

Although users can choose any of these service providers for transactions, they operate independently. Unlike blockchain networks that are constrained by consensus mechanisms, they cannot avoid single point of failure issues.

This reminds me of the similar problems faced by indexers in the Bitcoin inscription ecosystem back in the day. The indexers were almost monopolized by four major service providers, and once those four service providers encountered issues, the status of the inscriptions could not be confirmed.

So, looking at it this way, the X402 protocol still has many security risks to address, and on the other hand, its primary potential service target remains humans.

Reference link:

https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/core-concepts/facilitator

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