Ledgerless

@fchollet @agentcashdev Not just cost and speed. There's a third issue underneath them currently every agent-native payment system still requires a network intermediary, a validator set, etc. Two agents transacting directly, without routing through any third party, is a different design space entirely.

I basically agree. Agents are soon going to be buying services/resources online, and the world is going to need agent-native payment infra, like Sam's @agentcashdev We're probably looking at a >10x transaction increase.

@davidmarcus The open question inside "money" is enforcement: today's agent payment rails set limits in software, on the same server as the agent. That's fine until the server is the attacker. Hardware enforcement is the layer that hasn't been built yet. It's an infrastructure gap.

The agent protocol debate is a distraction. Agents don’t need a new language. They need identity, money, and bridges to the infra the world already runs on. The priority now is building products humans actually use, augmented by agents.

To be clear — what @coinbase built with x402 and what @tempo + @stripe built with MPP is infrastructure we reference and respect. This piece isn't a critique. It's asking what comes next. The interface layer they've built is right. We're exploring what the trust layer underneath it looks like. @gakonst 's x.com/gakonst/status… is a worth read

The layer underneath x402 and MPP x402 and MPP are real accomplishments. They took a 28-year-old HTTP status code and made it work. They gave agents a way to request a resource, receive a price, and pay programmatically, without a checkout form, without a human in the loop. That is a meaningful step forward. But both are solving the interface problem. How agents talk to payment rails. The rails themselves are unchanged. x402 settles through Base's consensus. MPP settles through Stripe's servers and Tempo's layer. The key question is simple: will rails designed for humans work for agents?

The manifesto lays out why starting from first principles on what a payment actually is, through where the current stack falls short, to what we're building underneath it. Would value a read - @ryanbsells, @vvkgopalan, @joeykrug, @adityaag, @yuris, @0xfishylosopher, @braveben, @doganeth_en

Our Manifesto: ledgerless.io

@0xfishylosopher oh we are the new design

x402 micropayments won't scale in current form: > the average x402 transaction is $0.09 > the average visa transaction size is ~$50 visa processes 24k TPS. for same vol, we need a chain that has 500x thoroughput = 12M TPS. we need tx batching or new designs for agent scale.