x402 isn’t good (yet)

While everyone understands that agents will get more done with a budget, no one knows which protocol will win agentic payment standard wars: x402, MPP, Skyfire, or another? So far, x402 is the most mature protocol with the largest transaction volume, but even its new "upto" payment scheme doesn’t support true usage-based pricing, as it gives agents a chance to consume resources and then skip out on the bill. I’ll walk you through our experience (and pains) implementing agentic payments for a marketplace of 30K+ web Actors, and how we made it work even with the current specs.