[Music] We are ready for our next talk. And for the next four talks, we're going to actually be doing something different, which is we're going to be highlighting four of our spotlight projects. ETH global spotlight is a initiative we started a few months ago where we get to give more visibility and more access to the rest of the ecosystem for projects that come out of the hackathon. And we have four projects here today. They also have boots outside.
You can talk to them and you'll also learn here over the next 10 minutes what each of them are doing. And they're going to share how they started, what they're doing, and how they're thinking about making an impact in this space. And the first project I want to bring on is MC Pay. And Luis is gonna tell you all about making MCPs and AIS and payments merge all together. Please give him a round of applause.
Hey, hey, hey, hey. All right. Hey everyone, I'm Micro U co-founder of MC Pay and yeah, I'm really excited to tell you all about it. Um, why we started it and how we believe it will be able to unlock payments for the next stage of the internet. we believe is the agent economy and I think I talked to some of you today.
We're all on the same page. Um but yeah, so we've been using software like this. It's still 2025 and we have to go through a lot of these things. APIs power a lot of our internet world, but they all come with the same old friction. So if you've ever integrated an API or any you know if you've used any software generally it goes like you sign up you add your credit card you manage keys if you're using an API and then you need to track quotas maybe add spending limits and that's mostly fine for us humans but think about an AI agent.
It doesn't have a credit card. It doesn't log into dashboards and the current way doesn't really scale. Less than a year ago, MCP or model context protocol was announced and it rapidly took the AI space by storm. I'm I'm pretty sure many of you have have used at least once. It it simply creates this universal way for agents to plug into tools.
Most most of the times you paste a URL and you're in. But there's a catch. MCPs make it very easy to connect but they don't solve O or payments very gracefully. So developers end up rebuilding the same old authentication subscriptions API keys and we think there's there's there there needs to be a better way for this and that's why we built MCPay. Uh with MCPay any MCP server can charge per tool call.
Payments flow in stable coins and other tokens are getting added. It uses X42, a new protocol um that was initiated by by Coinbase, but many others are adopting it too. It follows the H it kind of like support adds support around the HTTP 402 status code and with this we kind of don't you know we don't necessarily need subscriptions or API keys. So for the developer side it is quite simple and for the agents it feels native. We started this in ETH global Prague where we got finalist and yeah very exciting to be here in in New Delhi today talking about it.
So what exactly have we shipped so far? Uh monetization we offer two ways. Uh there's an SDK that by the way this is outdated as of yesterday. We've supported uh we've added a bunch of nicer stuff to to build your server but check the website and the UI. Um, ideally, you know, if you're a developer, uh, you can go through the SDK route.
You can plug in, um, our SDK directly into server, and that means you have programmatic control, advanced customization, and the ability to integrate payments right into, you know, the existing workflow. So, it's it's perfect if you want to, you know, have fine grain hooks or you're you're already comfortable coding these sort of things. The second route, and I know it's a little weird that I'm, you know, most developers are using MCPS these days, but um there's some nicer things to it too, like if you go to Smithery, for example, which is an MCP registry, you can launch your own server and add your keys. And for the mo and for most use cases, you could also like monetize it and and you know get payments yourself with your own um sort of keys. So in the MCP dashboard, you can configure pricing.
There's a whole like UI for it. And think of it like flipping a switch. You decide how to rate, what to rate per call. You publish, publish it, it's live, and then when you want to turn it down, you can just like remove that and your server is still running and this sort of proxy uh gets removed. On top of that, we added analytics.
So once your server is live, you just set pricing and forget it. Um on MCP, we we give you full visibility into your tools. you can inspect which ones are monetized, how often they're being used, how much you're earning. So, with analytics on the top uh right, you see the wallet. We've integrated with Coinbase server wallets, too.
So, users that are, you know, integrating um your server can create a wallet, fund it uh with with Coinbase on-ramp and easily start using your server without, you know, a lot of friction. And yeah, you can control spending. There's there's a lot of things um like one click install for cursor. We're adding more um very very soon. So you can just click and you create a link specifically with spending limit custom policies around um the the wallet the wallet connection as a way for to test like monetization.
Since this is such a new thing uh we decided to build what we called MCP build which is an MCP server that creates MCP servers. uh and it's instructed on how to build monetized MCP servers. It chips uh with sandboxes to for you to safely experiment and and and launch um an MCP server and test it right away. And then when you're when you're happy with your VIP coding, you can just hit deploy. It will auto deploy on right now Versell.
And yeah, that's pretty much it. It's it's one of the one of the coolest things we have there. But some of you might be asking what exactly is you know meipe using under the hood for powering payments. So essentially X42 as I mentioned and it it's quite simple. Clients can make requests and servers will respond.
All right before I can do that you'll need to sign this message right and essentially that message gives the ability for the server to settle your payment. This works with tokens like USDC that uh follow the uh can't remember now authorization. Well, it's EIP 3009. Go check it out. Uh but I hopefully in the future more tokens will get supported and u that's it.
So client makes the the request there's a server that will intercept that request and say no before I can do that you need to sign this message. The user signs a message retries the request and the server unlocks and makes the the payment. But you know talking a little bit out about like what this means for the future. We think that this will you know let us break software into nano services. So like with microp payments we believe that software will get unbundled and the tool isn't a subscription anymore.
It becomes a very tiny service. So you can pay a cent for a tool to translate a fraction of a cent to summarize 10 cents to generate a video. And each piece is priced, addressable, and usable by any agent. Every time an agent pays, there's a signal. You go from intent to tool to payment.
And that signal tells us exactly what matters, what people value or agents value enough to pay for. And over time, it becomes a high signal market of real demand. And in that market, the best tools arise. Right now, most usage of these tools is locked away inside platforms. Some registries do show us what are the top performers or the the top MCP performers but in in this microp payment world usage proofs will surface.
We we believe that most of this data will will need to be discoverable will need to be seen and that's how agents will find what matters and that's how developers will get discovered. So why now? Um well the tech is there. We have cheap stable coin rails. We have open protocols like X42 and others like AP2.
We're seeing MCP adoption for tools growing very very fast and we've been in the space for a bit and we're very excited to try this out. So for the next steps uh right now we have paper call payments fixed pricing we're going to add zk receipts with v layer dynamic pricing with the upcoming up to scheme on x42 and later on we hope that we can kind of participate as a agent commerce hub in the agent economy. So the web took us took off because of HTTP. It gave us a universal way to exchange information and we believe that again the Asian econ economy will take off when there is a universal way to exchange value and we hope to to build it with all of you. Thank you.
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Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.