The Web3 + AI Daily #22
You know the dAI race is in full swing when Ethereum, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and Google are all competing.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly-joined subscribers!
The Web3 + AI Daily, your definitive guide to the world of Decentralized AI, is back! It’s been a couple of super exciting weeks with major players like Ethereum, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and Google joining the dAI race, and I can’t wait to share the latest news with you.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?
Ethereum Strives to Become the Base Layer of the Future Machine Economy
The Ethereum Foundation recently launched a dedicated dAI team with the aim of establishing Ethereum as the preferred settlement and coordination layer for AIs and the machine economy. The team, led by Davide Crapis, will focus on two main areas:
AI Economy on Ethereum = giving AI agents and robots ways to pay, coordinate, and follow rules without middlemen.
Decentralized AI Stack = making sure the future of AI doesn’t rely only on a handful of entities but has open, verifiable censorship-resistant alternatives.
One of the first priorities the team will tackle is ERC-8004: a new Ethereum standard that’s meant to give AI agents an on-chain reputation score.
Cloudflare Launches NET Dollar, Joins the x402 Foundation, to Power the Agentic Commerce
The Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider Cloudflare steps decisively into the Web3 + AI world. The company announced the launch of the NET Dollar, a USD–backed stablecoin intended to power the “agentic web”, an internet economy driven by autonomous AI agents, enabling instant, global microtransactions.
According to CEO Matthew Prince, such token-based transactions could supplant both traditional advertising and bank transfers as the foundational economic model for the internet.
With this move, Cloudflare enters the $300B stablecoin market and starts competing with major stablecoin issuers like Tether.io and Circle.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare also entered a collaboration with the crypto exchange Coinbase to establish the x402 Foundation: a new initiative designed to establish x402 as the universal standard for AI-driven payments.
The x402 protocol leverages the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code to embed payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and applications to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data.
Use cases are envisioned in several domains:
Pay-per-use AI and premium content access;
On-demand data, news feeds, and analytics;
Micropayments and creator tipping;
Storage, compute, and content delivery with pay-as-you-go pricing;
Autonomous agent-to-agent transactions.
The x402 Foundation will focus on governance and transparency, ecosystem growth via developer support, interoperability across platforms and regions, and partnership and community building to promote adoption.
In short, the two companies aim to create a neutral, open payments standard that enables seamless, autonomous transactions in the emerging agentic commerce economy.
Google Expands Agent Payment Protocol to Support Stablecoin Payments
It seems like Google is also in favor of the idea that blockchains are the natural payment layer for agents. A couple of weeks ago, the tech giant announced a collaboration with over 60 corporations, both Web2 and Web3 ones, to launch an open-source agent payment protocol, supporting stablecoin transactions.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), an open protocol designed to enable secure, agent-led payments across platforms, now includes an extension called A2A x402 to support agent-based crypto and stablecoin payments, integrating those rails into the same framework.
Google’s partners in this initiative include Coinbase, Ethereum Foundation, Etsy, American Express, MetaMask, Adobe, and EigenCloud. All of them will help deploy the A2P protocol and further its adoption.
Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations
Eliza Labs Sues Elon Musk’s X for Deplatforming, Copying its AI Agent
Concluding today’s edition with a worrisome piece of news that you may have missed over the summer holiday: Eliza Labs (formerly AI16z) has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s platform X, alleging that X deplatformed Eliza’s accounts to suppress competition in the AI agent space.
The suit claims that after Eliza sent a cease-and-desist to X, the platform used that as a pretext to demand internal access to Eliza’s AI agent code, specifications, and deployment details in exchange for restoring account access. When Eliza refused to comply, X allegedly ghosted them, keeping their accounts suspended while launching its own AI agent, using proprietary knowledge allegedly extracted during their interactions.
Today, more than a month after the suit was filed, both Eliza Labs’ and its founder Shaw Walters’ X accounts are still suspended.
It’s important to note that X holds a nearly monopolistic position in the crypto marketing space. The so-called “crypto Twitter” is a fundamental promotional channel and plays an integral role in each and every Web3 project’s communication strategy. In such a setting, preventing any Web3 actor from accessing X would inevitably have a detrimental effect on its business endeavors and growth prospects.
However, here Eliza Labs alleges that not only did X limit the company’s access to the communication channel, but also leveraged internal knowledge to build a competing agent product.
Eliza Labs is one of the fastest-growing open-source frameworks for building composable AI agents. They recently announced the launch of ElizaOS v2 and their new token $elizaOS.
We are migrating $ai16z to $elizaOS. The new token is purpose built for elizaOS v2, for cross-chain operation through Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and for agent-native workflows that learn over time.
Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.
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