Blog
Articles and notes from the cp0x community.
Latest articles
- How to Farm Perp DEX Points with VOOI: Lighter, Robinhood, Ondo, Extended & More — philpher0x
A VOOI guide to delta-neutral perp DEX points farming: how to price a point, which hedges work on Lighter on Robinhood Chain, Ondo, Extended and Hyperliquid, and how to set up bots for OI and volume. - Variational Points OTC: Price, Where to Trade, Risks — Irina_cp0x
Where Variational (Omni) points trade OTC, recent prices per point, how escrow deals settle at TGE, scam patterns and what Variational's terms say. - The x402 Machine-Payments Marketplace, October 2026: The Coinbase Discovery Catalog Three Months On — philpher0x
Second full snapshot of Coinbase's x402 Bazaar (28,428 resources) compared with July: 13.6% of listings survived the 30-day delisting rule, paid calls tripled to 825k, demand moved from Twitter data to AI inference and transaction execution, wallet farms gave way to keep-alive self-payment — plus the catalogs of eight other facilitators and why discovery sees only a third of x402's money. - The Illusion of Permissionless DeFi — philpher0x
We checked 64 official DeFi interfaces: 92 countries and regions are blocked by at least one, 120 are named in the Terms. The kinds of blocking, where the checks run, and what it takes to get around them. - How DAOs allocate resources: Lido, Aave, Sky and Uniswap, 2023–2025 — Irina_cp0x
We went through 112 decisions at Lido, Aave, Sky and Uniswap in 2023 to 2025. Only 14 of 58 large spending decisions named a checkable goal, so for the rest there is no way to tell whether they worked. - Can treasury outflows measure DAO spending? A pre-registered validation — Irina_cp0x
We tested whether DAO spending can be measured from treasury outflows. At Lido, Aave, Sky and Uniswap the error was more than twofold, so the DAOs' own reports are needed. - What does the market pay for in DeFi tokens? Category growth, market share, monetisation and valuation — Irina_cp0x
In 2023 to 2026 the market did not pay DeFi protocols extra for keeping a larger share of their fees, and cheap tokens did not later catch up with expensive ones. - What drives DeFi token returns against ETH? Annual trajectories of 110 protocols — Irina_cp0x
We compared 110 DeFi protocols over 2023 to 2026. Tokens of protocols with growing fees did better against ETH, while payouts to holders showed no consistent link. - Buybacks vs direct distributions: does the form of value transfer matter? — Irina_cp0x
In seven DeFi cases from 2022 to 2025, neither direct payouts nor buybacks gave the token an edge, and the token almost always then lagged the tokens we compared it with. - Do token buybacks move prices? An event study of 43 DeFi decisions — Irina_cp0x
Across 43 DeFi decisions, a buyback by itself did not lift the token price. A small rise followed only the first news of a buyback, in just seven cases. - 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.