Today, @coinbasedev is announcing x402: an open standard/protocol to bring onchain payments to the web. Join us in killing the API key, and making the agentic and payable web a reality. All in one line of code. Imagine a future where crypto is the default to pay for *anything*.

After 7 years, my time at Coinbase has come to an end. It was the ride of a lifetime (launching x402 as just the latest example). Meeting @brian_armstrong and @FEhrsam, the cofounders of Coinbase, in @ycombinator Summer 2012 was transformational. They gave me my first Bitcoin (promptly sold ... oh well) and led to me reading the Bitcoin whitepaper. I became enraptured with Bitcoin smart contracts (literally, more than any other feature of Bitcoin). I wrote a stablecoin whitepaper (2014), wrote Ethereum's first security guide (2016) with @Consensys and our startup launched a DeFi protocol in 2017. @coinbase acquired us in 2018. That's when the real adventures started: 🚀 Growing USDC to $1 BN: In 2019, as the product lead for USDC under @balajis and as a former DeFi founder, I leaned hard into the brand new space of DeFi. With our USDC Bootstrap Fund and tight connections to every defi protocol, we—with our colleagues at @circle our first breakout hit as part of DeFi summer. Now $75 BN and counting. 🌐 Launching x402: Our team, led by @programmer, helped bring onchain payments natively to the internet by leveraging the 402 HTTP status code, working with @Google , @Cloudflare and many others. HTTP 402 was an idea from the dawn of the internet, and its time has finally come 👏 Listing new tokens and launching staking: For a while, I was the lead for launching new assets at Coinbase. Our Crypto team added many of the key tokens that define our current world like Solana, Tether, Uniswap,  Aave, and many more. A cracked Coinbase team of 50+ people spent a year planning out the massive Ethereum's move from proof of work to proof to stake with 100% slashing risk for billions of $. 🧑‍💻 Launching @CoinbaseDev: To get a billion people onchain, we need developer tools that are secure and easy to use. The mighty CDP team rethought our developer product and launched server wallets, embedded wallets, 1 click onramps, data APIs, and more. Lots more coming from them. Looking back, the joy of Coinbase was: - Doing novel things at massive scale - Making the complicated magical - Caring deeply about the details (security, legal, regulatory) - Collaborating with brilliant minds across many disciplines (legal, security, engineering, product, design, finance, cx, ...) I'm excited to take a break, but then get back into crypto. If you're a crypto entrepreneur building something, reach out. I'd love to pay forward the support I got long ago. And going to continue being a x402 evangelist.

Update: I'm now leading the Developer team at Coinbase (@CoinbaseDev). It's been a wild ride: from growing USDC to $1 BN+, adding 10+ blockchains, launching staking & bridging ... Next mission, bring 1 MM developers onchain through onramps, wallets, commerce, staking. Day 1.

Nearly 150 people coming to our first x402 in person gathering in San Francisco this evening. The x402 movement is growing.

Well this just happened. x402 transactions have exploded. Slowly, then all at once.

Packed house @Cloudflare to discuss the next phase of x402

Epic weekend with tons of hackers building at the @CoinbaseDev hackathon in Brooklyn, NY. Builders flew in from Malaysia, Italy, Canada, and more just for the event. And we dropped some alpha of what's coming from us. Some highlights from Day 1 🧵 #codenyc

Coinbase ❤️ Cloudflare = x402 Foundation With @Cloudflare and @coinbase, x402 is now a global and collaborative movement to reshape the internet by adding internet-native payments with the HTTP 402 status code. Here's why this is a big deal 👇

Google Agent Payments Protocol 🤝 x402

Hello, world. Excited to introduce Reva. With how good today's building tools are and the cool stuff you can create, I anticipate she'll be an expert vibe coder in just a few years 😉

San Francisco This Weekend 100+ builders from around the world Building Onchain AI with @CoinbaseDev and @base Amazing to see the energy and creativity at our AI hackathon.

Thrilled to announce that @programmer is joining @coinbasedev as our new Head of Engineering. With Erik’s leadership, we’re doubling down on making it frictionless to build onchain. 1M developers. 1B users. Onchain. Let’s go. 🌎

"It scares me how much of the world runs on top of stuff that people basically do in their free time." - @steveklabnik on open source software

The x402 community is growing, and it's time to get folks together. Come talk to other x402 builders at the first x402 community happy hour in San Francisco on October 8th evening. (Link below) More events coming soon.

Excited by @stripe's acquisition of @StableCoin (Bridge.xyz). They have singe handedly put stablecoins on the map for every payments company. Back in 2019 when we were pitching USDC to every fintech, it felt like a distant dream. Slowly, then all at once.

Starting to see some hypergrowth on x402 these last two weeks, as onchain agentic commerce keeps growing. Got some big announcements coming that should make these latest numbers look small.

Announcing some big steps to bringing the first billion onchain for our Onramp, by making it trivial to move from fiat to onchain: - Launched Apple Pay support today in US - Added free USDC onramping - Enabled offramping Next up: going international

Starting moments of today’s Agentic Commerce hackathon @ycombinator Nearly 300 people signed up

I don't think we talk enough about how amazing @UWaterloo is and what even top computer science programs can learn from them. @chintanturakhia and I left a chat with Coinbase's recruiting team saying "more Waterloo" for new eng hires and interns. Here's why 🧵

x402 now has a community led ecosystem explorer

Fun family story: my dad (@siddharthadalal) taught me Basic programming at 6, C programming at 12. I went to work in tech. Then I showed him Bitcoin and Ethereum at 67. He now teaches a class on crypto at Columbia.

Join some of the most critical voices in the space including @jai_prasad17, & @roberto_bayardo of @coinbase alongside @WhinfreyChris (@HopProtocol), @vaibhavchellani (@movrnetwork), & @schin_tomar (@biconomy). Join us here: nitter.app/i/spaces/1YqKDqllpyLGV

So you want to be a writer? A thread on building a writing habit (focused on software engineers with the writing bug but open to anyone who benefits) 👇🏽

Last week, @brian_armstrong and I spoke to all Coinbase employees about our vision for @CoinbaseDev (CDP): "Making it easier to build onchain than online, and supporting a million onchain developers building for a billion users."

It's been amazing to see the excitement for x402 this past week. 1 year ago, it was two engineers toiling on this as a weekend project. Soon, we'll upgrade the entire internet.

x402 keeps growing. Now works out of the box with Solana. Every AI agent is coming onchain.

Excited to be at ETH Denver. DMs open if you're an onchain builder and want to chat about how @CoinbaseDev can support you. And looking for early testers for some exciting payment standards we've been working on.

Had a frenetic and fun time hacking at @ETHGlobal #ETHNewYork with @danielque @DrewMAu and Veronica Zheng. Just launched defisurance on Rinkeby. Insurance for for Defi deposits using @AugurProject

You are totally missing how connecting groups of likeminded friends creates "in" and "out" groups. At Facebook, you literally have created a new form of online segregation, without reflecting too deeply on how much of an issue that is.

1/9 A quick thread on how best to donate your crypto earnings to any/all US 501c3 charities, while maximizing your donation and minimizing taxes: start your own donor advised fund (DAF).

Huge shoutout to our launch partners: @AnthropicAI, @awscloud, @base, @calcom, @chainlink, @circle, @fewsats, @hyperbolic_labs, and @NEARProtocol.

Excited to talk tomorrow at @iitbombay about x402 and agentic payments. We need the world's best builders to help grow x402, and there's no place like India's IITs for that. Talk details below.

The only flippening I care about is when onchain assets flip offchain assets. Introducing *Satoshi dominance*. Today, onchain assets have flipped all but ~10 stock exchanges. Next stop: flipping US public equities. Already at 5%+. Happening sooner than you think.

At @CoinbaseDev, we've seen thousands of builders deploy AI agents with wallets since November. Now excited to chat live at ETHDenver about everything we're seeing with agentic commerce. See you at main stage, 3:50 PM on Friday.

Last week, I was on @cnbc with @TaliaKaplan to talk about the first AI to AI financial transactions and how @CoinbaseDev's Onchain API-based MPC Wallets are playing a critical role for AI builders cnbc.com/video/2024/09/05/to…

It's eery how early crypto looks like other early disruptive markets, like the PC. Mainframe CEOs scoffed. Media struggled to understand the value. Early Steve Jobs was genuinely weird. Early use case (spreadsheet) were randomly discovered after years. nemil.com/crypto/rationally-…

Excited to launch our new developer wallets. Lightning fast. Secure. No key management needed. Base, all EVM and Solana compatible (to start). At @CoinbaseDev we're going to keep making it trivial and safe to build onchain whether you have hundreds or millions of users.

Was a blast to talk yesterday at Stanford on bringing AI Agents onchain at Blockchain Tech and Entrepreneurship using @CoinbaseDev's AgentKit. 100+ students who are going to build the onchain future — and deployed an onchain agent for the first time.

Come work for us. DMs open if you want to learn more. Looking for great eng, EMs, and PMs who love building great developer experiences.

At @coinbasedev, we're building the everything wallet for onchain developers. One SDK, every action. Onramp, send, swap, stake, balance, and more. No more having to finagle many different dev tools. Get started for free and in minutes with our Wallet API (link below).

Proud of @coinbase today on its listing! Thanks @brian_armstrong and @FEhrsam for inspiring me to read the Bitcoin whitepaper years ago, and for letting me be a tiny part of this crazy and wonderful journey.

It all starts with HTTP status code 402, payment required. Set aside for payments, it was never implemented. For years, the crypto community has talked about bringing blockchain payments to the web. We think the moment is now.

Absolutely love hiring former founders. There's some lessons you can only get in the trenches: - total ownership - doing every function - growing without large company distribution - getting knocked down and back up Loads better than any training out there.

This weekend, I got yet another note of an eng leader leaving their job to build agentic commerce on top of x402. Proud of these builders. @CoinbaseDev is here to support. The agentic economy will be onchain 🔥

We're building the developer platform we wish existed @CoinbaseDev And it's not just about devex, but making the UX for the next billion so much simpler than it is, so our developers benefit. Smart wallet, faster onramping, free USDC onramping, no gas are just the start.

The first time an AI agent has ordered pizza🍕 All onchain with Base and Coinbase Developer Platform.

Excited to be at @ETHGlobal's ETH SF at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts this weekend. Come hang and hack. Our team won the Coinbase prize in 2018, and now excited for @CoinbaseDev to sponsor multiple prizes. Ping if you want to meetup (DMs open, email in bio) or need any support from Coinbase Developer Platform.

Me (60 days ago): Dad, running a marathon at any age is insanely difficult. Have you thought this through? Dad (@siddalal): [eyeroll] I'm going to give it a shot. Dad proceeds to complete his first marathon at age 76, with 60 days of training, 300 days after a heart attack🏃🏾🤯

Startup tech stacks are like tree rings. You know exactly when they were founded based on the technologies (MongoDB, Rails, frontend frameworks) in their stack years later.

X402 keeps growing

How it works: - Client requests something - Client gets a 402 response - Client responds with a signed payment - (Server does work and broadcasts transaction) - Client gets response In JS, it's one line of code: app.use("/your-route", payMiddleware("$0.10", myAddress));

I'm excited to moderate tomorrow's Blockchain Interoperability chat on @Coinbase's #BUIDLCrypto. Crypto networks have exploded: now we need to get them to talk to each other. nitter.app/i/spaces/1YqKDqllpyLGV

I do lots of data-based research on filter bubbles. See for example: qz.com/1130094/todays-bigges…

A surprising number of engineering mistakes in the Valley are due to one fundamental mistake: Hacker News (and technical subreddits and conferences) are not a mirror of the industry. They are a bazaar. #NotesToAYoungSoftwareEngineer nemil.com/on-software-engine…

This week, @OpenAI and @CoinbaseDev announced Open AI's new Agents SDK works with CDP's AgentKit on Day 1, making it even easier to give your AI Agent an onchain wallet. Why this matters and why we're excited about multi-agent swarms 🧵

Thousands of developers have used AgentKit, pairing an AI agent with a crypto wallet. But it's impossible for an AI agent to pay. And many agent use cases are commerce based. AIs don't have credit cards. API keys are made for humans. Enter 402.

Shoutout to our sponsors for support and critical tooling @base, @hyperbolic_labs, @virtuals_io, @LatentHoldings, @Visa, @NEARProtocol, @Byte__AI, @xmtp_, @sekoia_virtuals, @openmind_agi, @HeyElsaAI, and @trySkyfire

There are two types of builders in crypto: those who've been through a cycle and those who haven't. And critically: both have an important role to play.

Price go up, price go down. We keep building.

Excited to announce the USDC Bootstrap Fund: blog.coinbase.com/announcing… And encouraged by all the progress made by @compoundfinance, @dydxprotocol, and the rest of the decentralized finance community.

Boz's goal is to maximize engagement and therefore growth/monetization for his company. At minimal, I'll argue that users need antibodies to understand why the tools he builds are not reflective of reality. Here's a guide I wrote to attempt to do that: github.com/nemild/hack-an-en…

Patrick is a legend: at Coinbase, at Avalanche, now at Commonware. Excited to see the impact Commonware is going to have in crypto.

Amazing you see the innovation using @CoinbaseDev at #CodeNYC From AI prompt to airplane ticket in 60 seconds.

My latest in @bankless: The Great Financial Crisis has some critical lessons on risk for DeFi

Was fun to talk at @ethereumsf’s opening ceremony on what @CoinbaseDev is doing to make onchain AI payments a reality. Excited to share more soon.

We think there's going to be many billions of wallets coming onchain — and we want to make it easy and secure.

With x402, agentic commerce is suddenly a reality. Your API can accept crypto, your paywall can accept crypto, your MCP server can accept crypto. Blockchains are global, permissionsless, and programmable, the exact characteristics that make them perfect for machines.

Build your own autonomous, onchain AI agent in 3 mins flat on @base with @CoinbaseDev's Based Agent. Comment below if there's functionality you want us to add.

Excited to launch @CoinbaseDev's new podacst: CDPod If you're an onchain builder, come learn from the smartest technical leaders in the world about scaling, security, usability, and more. Starting with @tbtstl from @zora

Favorite quote from an onchain developer at @coinbasedev offsite (2ish person team, millions of users): “Our first employee after me was ChatGPT” With AI, 1000X engineers are the future version of today’s 10X engineer. AI is unlocking already great engineers to be exceptional.

Excited to be at @ETHIndiaco in Bangalore this weekend to help builders ship using @CoinbaseDev . Come chat about AI agents, wallets, onramps, how we onboard a billion users, or how we grew USDC to a $1 BN+.

Last minutes before submission at @CoinbaseDev CodeNYC hackathon! Many of these folks stayed up the whole night.

Excited to chat about onchain development and onchain AI through @coinbasedev on Monday at ETHSF's opening ceremony.

With Coinbase Developer Platform, we're making it trivial for developers to bring the world onchain with onramps, wallets, commerce, AI agent solutions and more. We're looking for an exceptional eng leader for our team 👇🏽

Got an API you desperately want as an onchain builder on @CoinbaseDev? Fire away 👇🏽 We already got Paymaster, Smart and API wallets, Staking APIs, Onramps. And more coming soon.

Excited to offer @solana staking through our APIs and SDK at Coinbase Developer Platform. Stake Sol in just minutes.

In my latest piece for @qz, I argue that we need to worry about the "selective facts" shared in social media feeds even more than fake news. Each day, we help train social network algorithms to feature factual content that reflects our biases. qz.com/1130094/todays-bigges…

Design choices really influence this. Desegregated busing is one example, but there are much simpler design choices in tech products. Facebook builds everything around a) likeminded friends (compare that to Twitter), b) maximizing engagement in the Feed amongst this "in" group

Engineers in tech widely discuss exploits on the technology systems we manage. In my latest piece, I argue it's time to do the same for exploits of our information sources. nemil.com/musings/hack-an-en…

The same technology can be used for micropayments, paywalls, and more. No fees, instantaneous settlement, no transaction minimums. If you develop a website, check out our instructions: x402.gitbook.io/x402/getting…

No, developer platforms can't just buy developers. Paying developers will never make up for a platform's integrations, traction, and usability.

After years of reflection, my four (software) startup engineering killers are: 1. Premature scaling 2. Too much shiny/new tech 3. Bad hiring (great engineer, but not great startup eng) 4. Eng/business mismatch What are yours? nemil.com/musings/four-start…

John Adams remarked on the same: quotationspage.com/quote/335…

This is just the start. We're going to keep building this standard in the open. Join us. x402.org/

The poster child of DeFi is @compoundfinance which is a smart contract based bank. More in my piece for @bankless bankless.substack.com/p/defi…

And the $26 MM figure you noted is for Q1 2020 revenue alone. Using the annualized number of $100 MM gets you to a more reasonable 40X (2019 multiple is 63X). meritechcapital.com/blog/lem…

Blockchains are finally fast, scaled, and cheap. Stablecoins bring stability and easy global adoption. Usability has improved a ton. Hundreds of millions are onchain. Just as importantly, there's a critical use case for machine to machine payments: AI.

Was an absolute blast to chat with Matt on stablecoins, onchain AI, and our mission at @CoinbaseDev of bringing a million developers onchain. Shoutout to @virtuals_io @Byte__AI as just some of the innovative folks building on @CoinbaseDev

For many, cryptocurrencies are powerful because they allow us to transact without trust.  For me, its power comes from the fact that it actually lets us bootstrap greater trust in our society. nemil.com/crypto/why-cryptoc…

In cryptocurrencies, fascinated at the reasons why early engineers/designers/investors joined. What’s your crypto origin story? Here’s mine: 👇🏾 #WhyICrypto

Excited to make it easier to integrate blockchains everywhere.  🎉

Was epic to judge this weekend's Hacking for Agentic Finance hackathon @solana @RibbitCapital in San Francisco, where 50+ hackers connected AI agents to crypto. @truth_terminal is just the start. The next few months are going to a hotbed of Agentic Crypto innovation, and can't wait to see what folks do. Some highlights 👇

Bring an agent onchain and hack with @AnthropicAI @Replit and more at the Coinbase AI Hackathon from Feb 1-2 in San Francisco. Apply below.

Development has changed more in the last year, than the last 50. And the change is only accelerating. Come be part of the action @CoinbaseDev. Build the tools humans and AI need to interact onchain. Looking for engineers, designers, devrel and more. 👇🏽

Really excited to be back in Bengaluru for this weekend's ETH India hackathon. Worked on mobile payments years ago in Koramangala. The next generation of onchain innovation is going to be lit.

@programmer @MurrLincoln @carsonroscoe7 are building the stack for Agentic Commerce with x402, a protocol that bring payments to the internet Numbers are popping. We pre-announced fun things we'll share later this month, including how we're exploding the number of onchain agents

What an amazing journey through @ethereum's story at today's worldwide premiere of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story in San Francisco. Still remember reading the Ethereum whitepaper in 2014, and feeling weirdly sure that the world was about to change.

Epic weekend 100+ exceptional builders (over 500 applicants) @CoinbaseDev 's AI Hackathon in San Francisco Attendees from Dubai, Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona, Toronto, Stanford, Berkeley ... Our winners 👇

BTC $100k, but still scratching the surface: - BTC as a reserve asset - AMMs to replace the stock market - Yield protocols to replace yield accounts and lending - Onchain payments with CB Commerce Every fin primitive is coming onchain. Incredible time to build.