The x402 vs. MPP debate isn't about tech, it's about who gets to launch Cloudflare's NET Dollar. A stablecoin for bot payments, whoever issues NET (Coinbase or Stripe) likely gets their standard prioritized across a FIFTH of the internet. Cloudflare has been positioning itself at the center of agentic payments for the past year plus. They see the problem firsthand: bots are overwhelming the web, driving up costs and overloading servers. Wikipedia's traffic grew 50% from scraping. 71% of top publishers now block retrieval bots entirely. So, Cloudflare built walls (bot blocking tools) and also windows (pay-per-crawl, so sites can charge bots instead of blocking them). And who they choose to issue NET could determine which payment standard wins. The evidence that Stripe may have the edge: > Cloudflare CO-FOUNDED the x402 Foundation with Coinbase, but STILL hasn't named an issuer (even though CB issues stablecoins) > Per The Information, Coinbase is just ONE of several companies competing for the deal alongside ZeroHash > Cloudflare integrated MPP immediately > Pay-per-crawl already uses Stripe. ZeroHash works closely with Stripe David Christopher mapped out the full competitive picture.

everyone saying crypto twitter is dead no one saying where the next crypto twitter is there is no other large public forum where you can talk crypto reddit will ban you, bluesky will ostracize you, farcaster doesn't want to promote conversations CT is all we have

Art with no context is meaningless. First, platforms (leaded by BIG business people (DIOR)) killed the context of previous digital art, killing it almost completely (except those they chose). Later, re-invent context, narratives, omitting previous digital art context/history. Later, all this "context" is vanishing (bc platforms never were interested on it, for the reason of previous lines). Maybe people is starting to understand why some voices and trajectories were silenced, pushed out... Once EVERY platform vanish, we (well, few of us) will be in the EXACTLY same point when we started, long before platforms and cryptoart appeared. Did we stop by then? Nope. Will we stop now? Nope. We are the reason all this exist, platforms included.

$CRCL falls ~15% after the CLARITY Act deal signals no yield on stablecoin balances by allowing only activity-based rewards. That weakens a key part of the bull case by making USDC harder to evolve from a payments utility into a real store-of-value product.

> they are hard core open source 99% of the miladys i have seen have never shipped a real open source project in their life. we dont need this LARP culture for cypherpunk values

This post is getting some traction on the timeline, particularly in light of last week's announcement of MPP from Tempo/Stripe. It raises some interesting points, but also assumes some dicey