Agent Bootcamp with x402 I Lincoln Murr

[Music] Hey everyone, thank you all for coming in. Uh my name is Lincoln. I'm the product lead for Coinbase developer platforms AI uh initiatives. And today we'll be talking a little bit about X42 and some of the other products that CDP is here representing this week. Uh so the goal of the conversation is to basically give you a brief intro into how to get started with X42 and some of our other tooling, explain a little bit about the the motivation and purpose of X42, why these types of things exist, give you some project ideas, run through the docs, the repos, everything you need to build something cool this week.

So before we get started, by show of hands, who's heard of X42 before? Okay, solid. Most of the room. Great. Uh, in that case, I'll kind of try to quickly go over the brief explanation of it, maybe provide some motivation or value props that you haven't heard before, and share some of the things that we have coming out that we actually haven't announced yet.

So, you guys are going to be some of the first people to try them out and build with them this week. Cool. So, X42, as you all know, is a way to solve a problem that we saw with Agent Kit, which is what we released uh back in October. It was a tool to give AI agents access to a crypto wallet. It was hugely successful.

We had something like 20,000 agents deployed. Over 2,000 developers tried it out. But what we realized very quickly is that these agents didn't actually have anything to pay for. AI agents need an easy way to pay for API requests, data, their inference, all of these different things that help them become more autonomous and capable of interacting with a wide variety of different services to make them more useful for you. We think that there's a very strong role to play for crypto in this machine layer stack.

What we mean by this is traditionally with payment rails like Visa or PayPal or Venmo or whatever, there are all sorts of hindrances that have prevented them from being adopted for microtransactions over the past 10 20 years. We think crypto, specifically stable coins have an amazing role to play in this stack and facilitate the machine to machine economy in a way that we've never seen done before. So X42 is focused on agentic commerce. Part of it is killing the API key. So, in a room full of developers, I don't need to tell you how annoying it is to set up developer portals.

Like for OpenAI, for example, you have to sign into OpenAI. You have to preund the account with a credit card, pay a fee on that, of course. You have to take your API keys. You have to pass those to your agent. And only then can your agent start actually making tool calls.

What's nice about crypto and specifically wallets is that a wallet is both a unique identifier, but also a payment rail. So, you can have agents natively interact with services that they've never seen before. It's a frictionless experience and one I think you will absolutely enjoy over the weekend when you only have something like 36 hours to develop and you're going to want to spend as much time possible building and not trying to mess around with a bunch of different developer portals. We also think that intent is going to be the new interface. There's a survey out there somewhere that I don't have a graph for here that says that agentic commerce is growing to be a 1.

7 trillion industry over the next several years. Who knows if that'll be true, but I do know that it is very convenient to go on to chat GBT and interact with things. And when chat GPT already has a billion users in like two years of existence, clearly they're on to something. These are some of the use cases that we've already seen come out for X42. We have things like LLM inference, image and video generation, storage, social graph, web search, and ton more coming.

All of these things are enabled such that your agents can seamlessly interact across the internet. And there are various different types of ways that your agent can do it. One of the things that we just recently released that we haven't actually publicly announced yet is our X42 Bazaar. The name is pending, but the idea is to create a vibrant chaotic marketplace where all of these X42 enabled services can be easily discovered by your agent. So now, not only is your agent able to pay, it's also able to browse before it starts paying.

Meaning that you can have an agent that self-improves as this marketplace improves. And this weekend you have the opportunity to be some of the integral people building things for this marketplace and building the services that power the future agentic economy. So an AI can search for services, read this list, select a service, pay via explorer 2 and execute. It's boring to look at this flow diagram. I know.

So I'll actually show a clear example here shortly. So what's really the value prop to you? There's two kind of main things that I'm looking forward to seeing built out this week. One is if you're a service seller and you're working on an API or something or wrapping an existing API, you can get built-in distribution to every single agent that has a crypto wallet and is compatible with X42. Developers no longer have to find you specifically to use your service.

And when you're fighting for distribution and reach, this will be massive, especially when it's still very early. We have around 20 or so things on our X42 bazaar right now, and it's growing every day organically. Every time I check it, and there's something new there. If you're an agent, this is the easiest way for you to interact with APIs and pay for them seamlessly. One of the things I'm really excited about is the idea of agents that can improve and become dynamic with these services.

I think one good example is an agent that initially finds this bizaarre and realizes it can do stuff like pay for its own inference, pay for its storage, its compute, whatever. And now you have an agent that is effectively financially independent and it pays for its own life in some sense. and you get at these protodigital life forms that when you instill in them the fear that if they lose money or run out of money, they'll die, then who knows what'll happen. That's the type of things that I'm excited to see get built up. So, with that being said, I'm going to switch over to some of our docs, our repos, show you some of the other CDP products that help you build incredibly easy and seamlessly with X42.

So, the first place I recommend checking out is the X42 website. Here, there's a few valuable resources for you to get started. This is just x42.org. Pretty straightforward.

Uh, one is this ecosystem page. It's still being expanded, but this has a lot of projects that'll show you some of the people who have already built with x42. You can either integrate their services or you can choose to take what they've done and build something your own and use it as inspiration. We also here have a link to our GitHub and our uh our Discord. The Discord is where you can find help all weekend.

You can also find us at the booth. We're happy to talk to you about everything there. uh jam through ideas, debug. We'll have some engineers from the team as well to make sure you can get all the help that you need. Let's go over to the GitHub for a second.

It's a monor repo and I know this is a lot of overwhelming words and things, but all you really need to know is that we have a read me here to kind of walk through the motivation of X42 and we have this examples folder. The examples folder is going to be your best friend this weekend. There are a few specifically that I want to call out. If you're a fan of Python, then you can go into the Python package. But given this is a more crypto-oriented audience, I imagine a lot of you will be building in Typescript.

So there are a few different uh specific examples that I want to call out that'll make your experience really easy this weekend to start building. One are these clients. These are the things that you can pass to your agent along with a wallet that allow them to interact with whatever X42 service that they might want. We also have servers. These are examples of what it looks like to get your agent running or get your service running on mainet.

Really to do any sort of X42 interaction, it's as simple as having this payment middleware and copying and pasting it. You have to add a price, a network, and the actual API route that you want. And if you don't know what any of this means, that's also totally fine. You can either one, help us or just two, ask AI to do it for you. And this is an example of what one of those endpoints looks like.

I know this is really boring to look at code. So why don't we take a real example here? If I go back out to the TypeScript examples, you'll see this MCP embedded wallet example. This is one of our also newly released features that we're in the process of productionizing. It hasn't come out yet, uh, but this is kind of an early look for you all that'll make it really, really easy to get started.

What you really want to do here is follow this development guide and then when you set it up inside an MCP client like Claude, you'll have an embedded wallet, which is one of our new products that we're also very excited for you to build with this weekend. This wallet allows you to interact with various different X42 services and have a really clean UI. So, all I have to do, I've already set up this server, is say, "Show me my wallet." And what we will now see is a wallet popup. Here it is.

Normally, if you haven't signed in before, it'll ask you to just put in your email. You'll get a onetime pass key. And then when you enter that, you have all the things you need here to get started building. It's a little rough around the edges. I know the UI isn't the best.

So, if you wanted to improve on this or build anything out, you're more than welcome to. You can sign in, sign out. Uh, and one thing that's pretty cool here is this discovery list. So, this is what I was mentioning earlier of all these discovered resources that are available with X42. Every time I look at this, there's something new I haven't seen before.

Uh, like this one. I have no idea what that is. Um, this one is for looking at Coinbase uh ticker data. All sorts of interesting things here. And I'm excited to see what you guys build over the weekend and add to this list.

We can also do it natively within this uh within this cloud instance. So I'm going to say let's look at the discovery list and see if there's anything that'll help tell us the coin stock price. If so, hit it. And I have no idea if this will work. All the things in the bizaar are just there permissionlessly.

So hopefully it does. Fingers crossed. Uh but this is kind of the beauty of it is that we're still evolving this and we want to get you all involved in the process of building this out and making this a standard along with us. So, the first thing it did is it looked at this discovery list and it looks like it found exactly what we were looking for here. So, it costs 200 units.

That's like two cents or something that every single time it looks at it, it decides to uh think about something different. And you can see here it actually did make this call successfully. And we can see all of the most updated information. If we check back on the wallet, we'll see that we have it. Oh, it's like 0.

002 cents or whatever. Cool. So, yeah, all this information is here. uh this is a really really really innovative way for you to start getting distribution for your projects and also seamlessly interact with whatever services you might want to be involved with. So yeah, that's kind of the basic of X42.

To touch a little bit more on the documentation and the other tools we have available that I think you'll find interesting, I would recommend going to docs.cdp.coinbase.com. Here we have all of the different tools that we have in our stack that makes the process of building on chain as seamless as possible.

If you're going for the X42 bounty, I would recommend going for the embedded wallets and the on-ramp and the data ones as well because uh bonus points for integrating multiple things together and it makes us really excited to see all of the tools that we have start to grow uh in like a one seamless package like put all these Lego bricks together. The embedded wallet allows you to very easily have users sign in with their email. No private keys required and still have a self-custodial experience. If you used anything like Privy before, this is similar in nature but better in my opinion. Uh, similarly, we have an on-ramp.

So, if you want your users to very easily be able to on-ramp funds using crypto, I would recommend checking this out. One call out is that USDC doesn't work in New York. And if you're upset about that, reach out to the to the NYDFS, but there's nothing we can do about it this weekend. Um, but it's a great way for you to uh have your users feel like they can just Apple Pay straight into crypto, start interacting with things, not even really realize it's crypto if they need to. And of course, we have X42.

I put together a little hackathon guide here. This should give you some more information as you're building throughout the weekend. That'll be useful. I would kind of use this as a reference guide as you're getting started um to see all the different capabilities that X42 has. You can see how to monetize your API.

Um, you can see how to build these different types of agents. We have the MCP integration information about the bizaar. Um, as well as some other use cases that we're curious about. For example, you can build a mini app inside the base app. Uh, this is another way to get distribution and it allows people to very easily pay for things using crypto.

One example that's pretty fun is the uh one that's been around for as long as crypto, which is could you pay a microtransaction for a blog post? Normally, you don't want to go on the New York Times and see that you can't read an article and you'd have to pay $5 for a month-long subscription. What if you could just pay 10 cents? These are the type of things we're excited about with X42 particularly. It also has information about project ideas.

Um, so to give you a little bit more information about some of the things I think would be really cool, there's infinite APIs and services out there that right now are very difficult to interact with for the average developer. If you could wrap these in X42, not only would you be able to directly monetize off of those and help pay for the costs that you're taking on for providing, for example, uh, PDF to podcast, but you could also get instant distribution to all the other agents that are around this weekend. So, you can imagine if you're building an agent that has access to a wallet, an X42, by the end of the weekend, it will literally have more skills than when you started because other people are going to be adding to it all weekend long. We can also build agents that selfexpand their capabilities over time. I think one that would be interesting is an agent that has access to a website or the server that it runs on and the ability to restart itself.

And you can imagine it posts bounties on social media asking people to make PRs into the GitHub and if they make those PRs it restarts itself, gets those new capabilities and keeps on improving. All sorts of really, really fun things to do. The last thing I'll mention about what you could be building with X42 is improving the spec itself. There's a common misconception that X42 is a Coinbased product. It's really more of a standard and we're excited to support it as a credibly neutral piece of infrastructure that grows alongside the internet, not necessarily Coinbase.

The the mandate that I have with X42 is to focus on value creation, not value capture. You're all's job is to capture as much value as possible from this open standard distribution network, whatever. Ideally using CDP tools, but in a way that allows you to grow the overall ecosystem. A good analogy is Android. When Google created Android as an operating system, they intentionally made it open source and free to use.

That has resulted in it being part of 80% of the world's operating system inside cars, Kindles, everything you can imagine. We want the same thing to be true for X42. Any stable coin payment should ultimately built on X42 rails and we're moving toward that. I wish I could share more about some of the partners that we have lined up to build on top of X402 because I'm sure you've heard of a lot of them, but I can say it has really resonated with traditional tech companies who are excited about getting on board with stable coin payments. I have about 10 or so minutes left and I know there's a bunch of you here, so I really appreciate that.

I'm happy to take any questions or just jam through ideas for the rest of the time here. Um, if you don't have time to ask a question now, we'll be around all weekend at the booth. It's right next to the mentor stand kind of near the front where the snacks are and whatever. Um but yeah, happy building. Happy to take any questions.

Thanks. Yeah, start right here.

Yeah, it's really exciting. That sounds cool. Um I had a question. So if there's a for example open AI API and it has only access it with a API key generally is this able to accomplish that?

Yeah, good question. So if you're looking the question was like how do you take an open AI API and use it with X42? We have a lot of existing partners a lot of what you're seeing on the website here. Other ones are available uh both in my retweets um and in you look in the discovery layer. So if you want to take an API that isn't currently compatible with X42 and make it compatible, you can just write a wrapper where you basically have a server that says, "Hey, pay me 10 cents and I'll go call OpenAI with my API keys."

So that's how you can sort of expand the existing world of APIs that are already around into an X42 compatible way. And honestly, I think those would be the most useful ones to have. Uh if you are looking specifically for LLM inference though, we do have support from hyperbolic. Um yeah, hyperbolic-x42 vers uh where is it? Yeah, hyperbolic labbolic.

x42 X42 on GitHub is a repo that allows you to do LLM inference using X42. Good question.

So our project's aim is just to reduce the 200 latency on the X42. Is that allowed? It's just an extension.

Yeah, I would love to see it. I think you're going to have a little bit of difficulty given it's limited by the block time, but I'm more than happy to see what you guys come up with. That would be sick.

Cool. Cool. Nice. Any other any other questions? Yes.

And to clarify, you're not required to build points. So if you have like a good idea maybe for onample focus on those that would be totally fine.

Yes, exactly. Uh the question is around the prize tracks. I think it's a let's see actually is it kind of like you could have four really good projects.

Uh you know that's a great question. I imagine it's probably four really good or like one of each. Um I will admit that remains a little unclear. Let's see. Hold on.

Hold on. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yes. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Nice. Sweet. Okay. Yeah. Uh yeah.

Up to four teams will receive $5,000. uh for these suite of products. We'll probably end up doing one per each. Um yeah, I would highly recommend that if you're building with one of these, you pick a couple ones other ones as well. Like honestly, just because it's the easiest way to do it.

Like the uh the embedded wallet MCP like already has the discovery layer built in. It's like a really seamless experience. And like if you're already provisioning API keys to do something with one of these things, you might as well get the other ones in there as well. Yeah, good question. Any Yeah.

Yes.

Yes. Good question. So, I wanted to eventually become like the Google for agents with all these different endpoints. Right now, it's like a shitty Yahoo search. So, we got a long way to go.

That's what this weekend is about. If you wanted to build on top of the existing bazaar and add in search functionality and reputation features and whatever, I think that'd be awesome. And there's a great chance as well that if you just make a PR into the repo that it would just accept it and then use that canonically going forward. Um, but yeah, right now it's literally just a list that has all these things. Some of them could be malicious.

You could just be paying for nothing. So, I would uh I would recommend taking a look at that before you uh before you get too crazy with it. But it's improving. We're improving it. Any other?

Yes.

Yes, good question. So, that's a pretty good segue into agent kit, which I didn't really touch on here, but that is our tool for giving every agent access to a wallet and a comprehensive set of onchain interactions. Um, what's nice about agent kit is we have pre-existing integrations with various different frameworks. um, Langchain, MCP, Verscell's AI SDK, um, Amazon's AWS Strands framework as well. Um, all of these when you have your agent that has a wallet, uh, should work pretty pretty straightforward.

Um, if you have any questions or you run into any difficulties during the process, just come over to the booth. Uh, we've all worked on Asian kit as well, so happy to happy to jam on getting that working with you. So uh now implementing the X42 you're basically using the uh the tool that uh Coinbase provide and however uh if I want to receive payment from other say uh flow or how hard or is it possible for me to on the server side to request uh the payments?

Yes, great question. So the question was around like how could you accept uh different chains or different tokens? Obviously I'm sure a lot of you are interested in various different chains here. Uh the good news is it's actually pretty straightforward. Um so as a guide on what it looks like to interact with other chains.

If you go to the poll requests um we have some that are are uh closed already. So for example, there's a say one here that basically shows you everything you need to add a network and it's a five minute change. You basically just need the chain ID, USDC address, you get it. Just, you know, replace this with whatever chain you want. Um, this will make it really, really easy for you to get started with whatever chain.

As far as tokens go, the tokens that you accept do have to be EIP 3009 compatible, which basically is something that really only USDC and PYUSD to some extent have. Uh, PYUSD is a slightly different integration. Um, one of my goals this weekend is to talk to that team and figure out how we can get direct acceptance for that. But my recommendation would be like if you're just getting started in testing, just use baseio, whatever. Use the default and then once you get something working and viable, then just like switch it over to to flow or or pyd whatever different chain and token that you're using.

Um, so you can get something up and running and then focus on like all the things that'll get you the get you the prizes.

Yep. Any other questions? If not, we can go ahead and wrap it up. But thank you all so much again for coming. Uh, find us downstairs if you have any questions and happy building.

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