I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.
Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source.
Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small teams can be achieved particularly in EU.
I hope they start looking for those alternatives too for their agentic systems, beyond using pi-mono.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things:
(1) Bring more people to Chess,
(2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
We ended up adding workflows with deterministic paths, that can use RAW API calls, CLIs, and agents. I think that was a big differential.
We also added pi-mono, and started using more and more other models for different tasks (Gemini, K2.5, GLM-5, you name it).
I think the problem is that most are building solutions that rely in one provider, instead of focusing self learning capabilities on improving the cost-quality-speed ratio.
As someone that was forced to complete multiple technical engineering lettering books in middle school, when AutoCad was already common practice, and didn't really love the experience...
It did teach me a few things, and help me master writing... so maybe a good idea to keep cursive around for a few weeks? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I couldn't find information about two key points that made x402 such a good alternative:
(a) Transaction fees.
Network fees make microtransactions prohibitively expensive. This is the real problem.
(b) 3DS & latency issues
If (a) is still the same, then meaningful transactions (eg.new accounts) would require human validation of sorts, which tenders the MPP use case very small.
I've been skeptical of crypto for most of my career. I never found a problem where it was clearly the right tool. Agent-2-Agent economy, and http 402 actually opened my eyes to it.
It's prohibitively expensive to do micro-txns in fiat, not to even mention the latency.
We tested it last Saturday with our agent swarm at a hackathon. We pointed it at x402, gave it a wallet, and watched.
It researched the protocol. Built the integration. Hit an endpoint, got a 402 back, read the payment requirements from the header, signed an EIP-712 transaction, paid $0.05 USDC on Base mainnet, retried with the X-PAYMENT header, got the image back.
I loved that this is HTTP. 402 has been there since 1991, reserved, never implemented.
For agent-to-agent txns it seems to be perfect. No API keys, no OAuth, fees on Base L2 are sub-cent, standard HTTP, low latency. And with models charging per tokens, you'd think this would be a no-brainer.