Blockchain at Berkeley

a new @archetypevc newsletter is upon us the first edition of Directionally Correct drops tomorrow with an article by @Ashegan (spoiler alert he's bullish) you can subscribe in the comment below (pic unrelated)

last semester we hosted berkeley's best hackathon to date... today we're running it back with an even BIGGER hackathon. > $20k+ cash prizes > sponsored by @liquidtrading @Polymarket @AnthropicAI @Ripple + more > on pi day 2026 babhacks.com 👀

hosting a berkeley builder meetup with @cory at the office on 2/2 comment or dm if you want a spot!

Had an amazing chat with @nemild (one of the authors of x402) about x402! Key insights: - The internet was made for humans, not AI agents - Traffic for some publishers is down 50-60%, requiring publishers to rethink their dependence on ads - 6 months ago, there was nothing, now there are 1B+ 402 responses a day, and there have been days of 1M+ in volume - Obvious use cases include: 1. Booking (instead of going through multiple user flows for flights, hotels, booking attractions, a single agent can do it all) 2. Micropayments - x402 makes sense if you only go to a website once in a while - Cloudflare's facilitator batches payments - We still need much of the core infrastructure: 1. SSL equivalent 2. Facilitator versions 3. on/off ramps 4. wallets for agents - 2 bottlenecks are onboarding merchants and creating novel use cases for consumers - Crawlers are an existing use case that prove initial traction - The x402 github repo needs active contribution! - The onchain stack looks like: 1. Blockchains 2. Stablecoins 3. x402 4. Know your agent 5. Dispute resolution - If crypto was around in the 90's, it would have been obvious to use 402 - @nemild 's goal is that within a year, there will be a day with 100M in volume through x402 and that the number of ai agents with active payments reaches 100K (where @programmer might shave his head? + can we get a @Polymarket for that?) Time stamps: 0:30 Berkeley > Stanford 1:00 Nemil's Background 2:40 http 402's History 4:50 Coinbase's Internal Bet's that led to x402 6:00 Why do we need x402 when we have payment processors? 8:00 Advertising's historical role to fund publishers 9:45 Overview of x402 14:00 How facilitators work 15:00 Facilitator designs 16:50 Current Traction 19:50 Cloudflare's Facilitator (Batch settlement) 21:00 Verification of data sent by merchant/publisher 23:15 Know-your-agent 25:10 In 5 years, what will the x402 ecosystem look like? 28:00 Existing deals of AI firms paying to scrape content 29:00 How to go from memcoins to mainstream adoption 31:25 What use cases can be made? 33:00 Wallet setups for agents 35:40 Nemil's x402 foundation journey 37:50 Teams building x402 and open areas of development 41:30 LLM Hallucinations 43:00 Reversibility of transactions 45:00 How do micropayments work with gas fees? 46:50 How to get fintech/payments firms excited? 48:50 Goals of x402 to hit next year 50:50 Parting thoughts