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Articles and notes from the cp0x community.
Latest articles
- How DAOs allocate resources: Lido, Aave, Sky and Uniswap, 2023–2025 — Irina_cp0x
At Lido, Aave, Sky and Uniswap in 2023–2025, only 14 of 58 major spending decisions had a goal checkable in public data. No robust pattern. - Can treasury outflows measure DAO spending? A pre-registered validation — Irina_cp0x
Pre-registered test on 12 protocol-years (2023-2025) finds that automated treasury outflows miss reported DAO spending by about 2.2 times. - What does the market pay for in DeFi tokens? Category growth, market share, monetisation and valuation — Irina_cp0x
cp0x study 4, 2023–2026: at equal fees, DeFi tokens with higher take rates were not valued higher (coefficient −0.03, 95% CI −0.40 to 0.34). - What drives DeFi token returns against ETH? Annual trajectories of 110 protocols — Irina_cp0x
In 110 DeFi protocols (2023–2026), fee growth was the only pre-registered factor that survived all pre-specified checks in the main 2023–2026 analysis of token returns against ETH. - Buybacks vs direct distributions: does the form of value transfer matter? — Irina_cp0x
Seven DeFi cases, 2022-2025: no form of value transfer showed a consistent 90-day price advantage; six of seven were below the main control. - Do token buybacks move prices? An event study of 43 DeFi decisions — Irina_cp0x
43 DeFi value-return events: only first buyback announcements beat both controls (+4.2 and +12.0 pp over 30 days, n=7); votes and later changes did not. - The Truman Show Economy: What AI Agents See When They Try to Buy — philpher0x
85% of x402 payments aren’t what they look like. AI agents see payments, reviews, rankings, and providers, but still struggle to know what’s real. ERC-8004 adds public reputation — but that reputation is easy to manipulate. And now we have a new candidate, 402Pilot: another early attempt to help AI agents escape this “Truman Show” when deciding what — and who — to pay. - Where's the Money in x402: An Analysis of Coinbase's Bazaar Catalog — philpher0x
An analysis of a full snapshot of the x402 Bazaar — Coinbase's discovery catalog of 25,443 paid resources for AI agents. The real size of the agent payment market, the share of faked popularity metrics, and the shift in demand from data to paid actions. - x402 Payment Schemes: exact, upto, and batch-settlement — philpher0x
Learn how x402 payment schemes work: exact for fixed-price payments, upto for usage-based billing, and batch-settlement for high-frequency micropayments via payment channels. - The Future of Subscriptions: How Machine Payments Could Change the Internet — philpher0x
How machine payment protocols such as x402, MPP, and APP could reshape subscriptions, enable pay-per-use services, and change the way users pay for software and online services. - Guide to Agentic Economy Protocols: How Agents Communicate, Pay, and Discover Each Other — philpher0x
What the agent economy is, which protocols are shaping it, and how they fit together into a unified stack - Monetizing APIs in the Agentic Economy: x402 Bazaar Explained — philpher0x
In a world where software calls software, distribution becomes a technical problem. This guide shows how to monetize your API and get discovered by agents through x402 Bazaar. - x402 `upto` vs MPP Sessions: Two Philosophies of Usage-Based Payments — philpher0x
A deep comparison of x402 `upto` and MPP Tempo Sessions: how they handle variable-cost payments, micropayment streaming, escrow vs allowance models, and when to choose each architecture for machine-to-machine payments. - x402 vs MPP: Almost Honest Comparison — philpher0x
An in-depth comparison of x402 and MPP covering architecture, payment models, facilitators, sessions, scalability, and protocol trade-offs for building machine-payable APIs.