AIsa Awarded Second Place at Circle & Google-Backed Agentic Commerce on Arc Hackathon

Introduction

This year marks my 10th anniversary in the Web3 industry. Looking back at 2024–2025, we witnessed a "Bitcoin Renaissance" bull market. During that time, I built the first non-custodial browser extension wallet based on the Taproot Assets protocol from Lightning Labs. However, while waiting for USDT to return to the Bitcoin network, the bull market began to fade. To this day, we still lack a native stablecoin on the Lightning Network, the Taproot Assets protocol or the RGB protocol.

Despite this, stablecoins have been globally recognized as the second "killer app" of blockchain technology. The timing is perfect to build a new type of payment system using stablecoins. While stablecoins have existed as a payment method for years, the theme of our era has shifted. With the rapid evolution of AI Agents, the next generation of payment systems is no longer being built for human transactions, but for AI Agents — this is what we call Agentic Commerce.

Second Place at the Agentic Commerce on Arc Hackathon

Last Friday, my colleague, Karen Sheng and I, won second place at the Agentic Commerce on Arc Hackathon in San Francisco, organized by Arc (Circle Team) in collaboration with Google DeepMind, Google AI for Developers, Google Gemini, Google AI Studio, and MindsDB, and hosted by LABLAB.ai. The hackathon explored the future of agentic commerce. I'd like to take this opportunity to share our vision on how to build a payment system for the current stage of AI evolution.

Karen Sheng presented onsite:

"The per-seat subscription model is becoming a legacy. It is fundamentally misaligned with AI-native products, where every interaction — query, generation, or analysis — incurs tangible compute costs. Usage-based pricing is eclipsing subscriptions, and yet is still largely locked on traditional payment rails."

"Traditional payment rails struggle to support high-frequency, low-value transactions due to fee structures, chargeback risk, and reconciliation overhead. In practice, standard card transaction fees of 2.9% + $0.30 severely erode margins, making any top-up below $1 economically impractical."

Our goal is simple: to make it frictionless for pay-per-use (PPU) applications to bridge onto stablecoin payment rails. The direction is clear, but how do we execute it? Let's first talk about x402.

The x402 Protocol

Coinbase released the x402 protocol whitepaper in May 2025. We followed up with some interesting experiments in June, and by October, the x402 protocol exploded across the Web3 industry following a viral tweet from a16z. HTTP 402 is a "Payment Required" error code that has been reactivated and reimagined. x402 represents a brilliant innovation at the intersection of Crypto and AI; it is a payment protocol specifically for AI Agents. Because fiat currency is not "internet-native," Crypto is the true currency of the web.

Around the x402 ecosystem, many Web3 teams have developed products such as Facilitators, x402scan, and x402 Paywalls. The protocol has rapidly iterated from v1 to v2. Coincidentally, that same week marked the day ERC-8004 goes live on the mainnet. ERC-8004 is an AI Agent standard developed on Ethereum that provides a mechanism for identity registration and conduct evaluation for all AI Agents within Web3's permissionless environment. With x402, ERC-8004, and the recently emerged MoltBot (formerly ClawdBot), AI Agents are finally approaching the form we've long anticipated!

A Reality Check

Let's take a step back from Web3 and look at the Web2 reality. The vast majority of internet and AI products still only accept fiat payments and rely on subscription models. One reason is that stablecoin adoption remains relatively low — most users only hold fiat. Another trend is that traditional platforms are slowly shifting from subscriptions to Pay-Per-Use (PPU). For instance, I noticed that Alchemy recently transitioned its Growth Plan into a "Pay As You Go" metered pricing model.

There is also a psychological barrier: humans are not yet ready to give AI Agents full autonomy. Seeing MoltBot take control of a Mac Mini makes some people uneasy; the perceived risk is high, let alone letting an Agent spend money freely.

Therefore, for the current stage, humans still control AI activities. In my view, current payment solutions cannot be "pure Web3" yet. We need to integrate with Web2 platforms, helping them adopt stablecoins and transition toward PPU models.

Our Solution

We built a payment layer purpose-built for pay-per-use (PPU) applications, designed as an alternative to fiat and x402-based payments.

The AIsa AI Marketplace (One interface for compute, data, and monetization) is already utilizing this solution. It supports both fiat and stablecoin payments, as well as subscriptions and x402.

We can provide existing internet and AI platforms with a hybrid Subscription (via Escrow Account) + PPU (via x402 v2) model. By supporting dual fiat and stablecoin accounts and seamlessly integrating with existing billing systems, we are preparing the payment infrastructure for traditional Web2 platforms to enter the Age of AI Agents.