PING currently has a market value of over 30 million USD, with a 24-hour trading volume of over 20 million USD.
Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
The once-booming inscription story in the Chinese market has long faded, and even ORDI is rarely mentioned anymore. However, recently, the heat of the x402 protocol has begun to shift from discussions in Western communities to the East.
The first token issued by the x402 protocol, PING, quickly recorded returns of several times its value. According to GMGN market data, PING's market value is currently around 30 million USD, with a 24-hour trading volume of 22 million USD.
In January 2025, Coinbase officially launched the x402 protocol, positioning it as an "internet-native payment standard," aimed at activating the HTTP 402 code and deeply integrating with the Base chain. The early version focuses on a developer toolkit, providing Python and Node.js libraries for easy integration.
Its name comes from the HTTP 402 status code (Payment Required), a long-idle HTTP response code used to indicate that payment is required for resource access. x402 cleverly activates this code, embedding payment functionality through blockchain technology to enable seamless transactions without the need for registration, email, OAuth, or complex signatures.
At its core, x402 leverages its low cost and high speed advantages. The protocol supports micropayments with stablecoins like USDC, with a settlement time of just 2 seconds, and the protocol itself incurs zero fees. This makes it particularly suitable for autonomous payment scenarios for AI agents. For example, an AI agent can directly request data from an API, paying a small fee without human intervention. This addresses pain points of traditional payment systems, such as account creation, KYC verification, and fiat currency conversion, ushering in an era of "agent-to-agent" payments.
The workflow of the protocol includes: the client initiating an HTTP request, the server returning a 402 code along with payment details; the client generating an EIP-712 signature to authorize the transfer of funds; and a facilitator, such as Coinbase's CDP, processing the transaction to ensure compliance (such as KYT/OFAC checks). This is applicable not only to Web3 applications but can also extend to Web2 services, achieving cross-domain integration.
The core value of x402 lies in empowering the AI economy. With the rise of AI agents, such as autonomous agents needing real-time payment tools, data, or computing resources, x402 provides a frictionless solution. It supports multi-chain compatibility, including Avalanche, Polygon, and Solana, with plans for further expansion in the future. Compared to traditional payments like Visa or Google's AP2, x402 places greater emphasis on decentralization and instant settlement, avoiding T+2 delays.
This month, x402 has seen an explosion in the Base ecosystem. The open-source nature of the protocol has attracted numerous projects, including Kite AI (providing identity and payment infrastructure for agents), Questflow (a multi-agent coordination layer), and Firecrawl (a web scraping API). The ecosystem page shows that there are currently dozens of projects covering infrastructure, client integration, and service endpoints. Meanwhile, x402's trading volume has surged, especially after the launch of PING, with a total trading volume exceeding 14 million USD in the past 7 days and 31,400 buyers.
The PING token was launched on the Base chain on October 23 (address 0xd85c31854c2B0Fb40aaA9E2Fc4Da23C21f829d46), where users paid 1 USD USDC through a CLI interface to randomly receive 5,000 PING tokens, with an uncertain success rate, similar to inscription minting.
Users can enter the official website, then input the contract address in the search box or find the corresponding token, connect their wallet, and the Fetch 1 USD label will be displayed.
Participants can choose based on a comprehensive consideration of trading volume, number of buyers, and number of transactions.
Currently, the x402 ecosystem also includes several launched and yet-to-be-launched projects, such as Questflow (SANTA), AurraCloud (AURA), Meridian (MRDN), and Kite AI (which has completed 33 million USD in financing and has not yet launched a token).
As early as May this year, user Simon Taylor commented, "x402 makes digital currency flow like data, creating a truly meaningful subscription alternative in the internet economy." He boldly predicted: x402 could bring security to money like HTTPS and become a standard supporting trillions of transactions.
The explosive popularity of x402 seems to have led some players to see it as a prelude to inscriptions, causing its market value to soar from 0 to 30 million USD in a short time. A community player commented, "In the simplest terms, the reason for the explosive narrative of x402 is that the market is extremely hungry for narratives that have a system, logic, and imaginative space."
A user with the Twitter ID nake13 stated that x402 is merely a very simple payment protocol. "x402 is quite different from the payment platforms we imagine because it is simple beyond imagination. It only focuses on the verifiability of on-chain payments, and that's it. It doesn't care about any additional functionalities, such as whether the merchant delivered the product after the user paid, or if the user wants a refund, etc. It only cares whether the user has made a payment for a 'product' and informs the merchant of the payment result, and that's where it ends."
Although x402 currently has a certain level of popularity, the heat of the crypto market changes rapidly, and Foresight News reminds participants to pay attention to risk control.
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