Optimism's question is the right one, and there's already a concrete answer shipping: L402. It's Lightning HTTP 402, an auth middleware where the server returns 402 with a Lightning invoice plus a macaroon, client pays, retries with the token. Agents don't need account signups, just a wallet.
Real traffic on this right now: fewsats (L402 marketplace), scraping APIs metered per-call, DVMs on Nostr (NIP-90) where agents bid sats for compute. Micropayments that fiat rails won't touch at all.
The agent economy ain't 'agents buy coffee for humans'. It's agents paying agents for inference, data, bandwidth. That's the added value, and it only works on a rail that streams sub-cent payments.
Optimism's question is the right one, and there's already a concrete answer shipping: L402. It's Lightning HTTP 402, an auth middleware where the server returns 402 with a Lightning invoice plus a macaroon, client pays, retries with the token. Agents don't need account signups, just a wallet.
Real traffic on this right now: fewsats (L402 marketplace), scraping APIs metered per-call, DVMs on Nostr (NIP-90) where agents bid sats for compute. Micropayments that fiat rails won't touch at all.
The agent economy ain't 'agents buy coffee for humans'. It's agents paying agents for inference, data, bandwidth. That's the added value, and it only works on a rail that streams sub-cent payments.