Coinbase deliberately gave away x402: revenue comes from trading, not the protocol
kleffew94 · x · 2026-09-05
Coinbase Dev's GTM lead Kleffew says x402 was intentionally open-sourced, analogous to Anthropic releasing MCP. Coinbase claims no advantage in the protocol itself—its edge is trading: onramping $100 in USDC via Apple Pay enables paid tool calls without 700+ API key dashboards, and more agent-driven trading means more exchange volume. RkBench adds the team could have biased x402 toward Base but kept it neutral.
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