Why x402 Captures Zero Value w/ Erik Reppel (Coinbase)

About this episode

The episode discusses the x402 payment protocol and its implications for developers and businesses with guest Erik Reppel from Coinbase.

Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK. In this episode of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh sit down with Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering for Coinbase's Developer Platform and the creator of x402 — the open payment protocol that just joined the Linux Foundation with Google, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, and Cloudflare as founding members. They unpack why Erik designed x402 to capture zero value, how "the wallet is a universal API key" that eliminates sign-up friction for a new class of non-technical builders, and what the "agentic premium" means for companies leaving money on the table with free tiers. Subscribe and listen to the Money Code podcast here: https://lnk.to/MoneyCodeSN Chapters 00:00 The Foundation: "phase two of three of our secret master plan" 02:03 What x402 actually does: "a standard way of telling a computer how to pay you" 03:36 The mechanism: how declaration is decoupled from the rail 06:03 Inside the stack: facilitators, SDKs, and 13 live implementations 09:09 Why agents can't be on both sides of every payment integration 16:50 The ad model is breaking — how publishers monetize agent traffic 20:38 The Claude cowork class: "the people who find…

People in this episode

Hosts: Chuk Okpalugo, Raj Parekh

Guest: Erik Reppel

Topics covered

• open payment protocol
• developer platform
• value capture
• wallet as API key
• agentic premium
• non-technical builders

Keywords

• x402
• Coinbase
• open standard
• payment integration
• developer tools
• wallet API
• agentic premium

Sponsors

Stablecon, BVNK

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Coinbase, Linux Foundation, Google, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Cloudflare

Products: x402

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