标签：#x402

I run a content site, do-and-coffee.com . Like everyone else, it gets scraped by AI crawlers. Instead of blocking them, I did something else: I put a paywall in front of the site that returns HTTP 402 Payment Required to bots, with machine-readable payment instructions. If a crawler pays a cent in USDC, it gets the article. If it doesn't, it gets the 402 and nothing else. Then I let it run for 30 days and watched. Here's what actually happened — and it's not the number you'd put on a pitch deck. TL;DR A Cloudflare Worker sits in front of the site. AI crawlers get 402 + x402 payment requirements ; humans and search bots pass through free. Payment is USDC on Base , $0.01 per article, verified and settled through Coinbase's CDP facilitator. 30-day result: 5,811 crawler requests, 5 paid, 5,806 served a 402. Revenue at $0.01/article ≈ $0.05 . The interesting part isn't the revenue. It's who paid: GPTBot paid 4 times out of 48 requests; ClaudeBot paid once out of 651. Architecture do-and-coffee.com/blog/article/* ─▶ x402 Worker (Cloudflare) │ has X-PAYMENT-RESPONSE? ───────────┤─▶ yes ─▶ proxy origin (200) KV cache hit (payer:url)? ─────────┤─▶ yes ─▶ proxy origin (200) no X-PAYMENT? ─────────────────────┤─▶ 402 + payment requirements has X-PAYMENT? ────────────────────┘ │ ├─▶ CDP /verify (is the signed payment valid?) ├─▶ CDP /settle (waitUntil: confirmed — on-chain) └─▶ on success: KV.put(payer:url, receipt, ttl 24h) ─▶ proxy origin The worker speaks the x402 protocol: a 402 response carries an accepts array describing exactly how to pay (scheme exact , network base , asset USDC, amount, payTo wallet). A compliant agent reads that, signs a USDC payment, and retries with an X-PAYMENT header. The worker verifies and settles it through Coinbase's facilitator, then proxies the real article. How it works The 402 response When there's no payment, the worker builds the requirements and returns 402: function buildPaymentRequirements ( resourceUrl : string , env : Env ): Payment

If you build agents on Base, two things landed recently that are worth connecting. First: Base shipped its own Agent Skills. There's now a base/skills repo with consolidated skills that teach an AI agent to connect to Base, deploy contracts, authenticate wallets, and run nodes — installed with one command via Vercel's npx skills CLI. Second: that CLI is part of a fast-growing, cross-agent ecosystem most crypto devs haven't clocked yet. So this post does two things — explains how npx skills and skills.sh actually work, and shows where the payment layer in Base's skills stops and how to extend it with x402 pay-per-call and batch disbursement . What npx skills actually is npx skills is an open CLI from Vercel Labs for installing "skills" — modular SKILL.md files that teach an agent a specific capability without stuffing everything into its context window. A few things make it different from what crypto devs usually expect: GitHub is the registry. There's no central package server. Any public GitHub repo with a SKILL.md at its root is a valid, installable skill. Install with npx skills add owner/repo . It's cross-agent. The same skill installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Goose, Windsurf, Gemini, and dozens more. You write once; it works across the agent you (or your users) actually run. skills.sh is the directory + leaderboard. It ranks skills by real install counts pulled from telemetry, with all-time, trending, and hot lists. There's no editorial submission step — you publish by putting a skill in a repo, and installs surface it. The format underneath — SKILL.md — is an open spec, which is why Base, Vercel, Anthropic, and a long tail of independent devs all use the same files. Here's Base's install, for reference: # Base's official agent skills npx skills add base/skills --skill build-on-base npx skills add base/skills --skill base-mcp build-on-base is a consolidated Base dev playbook; base-mcp wires up a Base MCP server that gives an agent a wall