Author: momo, ChainCatcher
The explosive popularity of the x402 protocol has brought a long-ignored issue to the forefront: the automatic payments between AI Agents require a more efficient and automated underlying protocol than human payment systems. By redefining the HTTP 402 status code, x402 indeed provides a foundational syntax for micro-payments between machines.
However, the birth of the x402 protocol is merely the starting point for the practical application of AI Agent payments, not the endpoint. It defines "when to pay," but does not answer more complex business logic questions such as "how to fairly distribute payments" and "how to verify that services have been delivered." These underlying issues are precisely the real bottlenecks that hinder the AI Agent economy from moving from demonstration to large-scale application.
In this context, several experimental projects have emerged around the real implementation of AI Agent payments. Among them, the new actions of the Metis ecosystem regarding x402 are particularly noteworthy.
This week, LazAI, a Web3 native AI protocol incubated by Metis, in collaboration with ZKM, Metis, and GOAT Network, launched the multi-currency payment system GMPayer (GOAT-Metis-Payer) powered by x402. In simple terms, the purpose of launching GMPayer is to make the x402 protocol truly usable, allowing AI agents to make instant payments across chains and in multiple currencies without intermediaries, accounts, or human intervention.
GMPayer also introduced the proof-of-concept token $BANG, allowing users to experience this payment system. Community participation was very high, with a minting limit of 500 million tokens on the GOAT Network and Metis Andromeda chains, which were completely minted out in just 7.5 hours, involving nearly 2,000 addresses and generating over 100,000 transactions.
How does LazAI, in collaboration with multiple projects in the Metis ecosystem, implement AI Agent payments through GMPayer? What advantages does it have? What does this mean for the Metis ecosystem? This article provides a systematic overview.
Why is LazAI's layout of x402 inevitable?
A significant strategic update for the Metis ecosystem this year is the initiation of its AI strategy. Its positioning is no longer limited to Layer 2 but aims to be the infrastructure for the integration of blockchain and AI.
The specific implementation of this strategy relies on the trinity architecture of the Metis ecosystem's co-evolution: Andromeda serves as a solid settlement layer, ensuring the security and finality of assets and transactions; on top of that, Hyperion acts as a high-performance computing layer, providing the necessary high throughput and low latency environment for AI applications; while LazAI at the top layer transforms the underlying infrastructure into real experiential applications, creating perceivable value and playability for users.
In August, LazAI launched its testnet. During the testnet phase, LazAI focused on addressing core issues such as the lack of quality verification in the AI field and unfair revenue distribution, with its DAT (Data Anchoring Token) standard being central to solving this problem.
With the explosive popularity of the x402 protocol, LazAI has found a greater application. LazAI uses DAT to define "what is valuable" and "who the value belongs to," but it needs a mechanism to realize "how value is exchanged." The payment trigger standard protocol of the x402 protocol conveniently provides this missing link. The combination of the two allows each API call to automatically complete value assessment, payment triggering, and revenue distribution.
How does GMPayer create a closed loop for AI Agent payments?
LazAI verifies the feasibility of pay-per-use, cross-chain payments, and the AI Agent economy by launching the specific x402 application product GMPayer. According to the GMPayer official website, it builds a payment closed loop for the AI Agent economy through four core components: DAT, Facilitator, iDAO, and the x402 settlement layer.
First, GMPayer addresses the issue of how to fairly distribute value. Through LazAI's DAT (Data Anchoring Token) standard, GMPayer can clearly record the assetization information of data, copyright sources, and revenue distribution objects, solidifying "who contributed what" into an immutable on-chain record.
When an AI service is called, the relevant DAT triggers the GMPayer's x402 settlement layer smart contract, automatically executing per-call payments and real-time revenue sharing. This ensures that data contributors, model developers, and all value creators can receive precise and immediate rewards, establishing a trustworthy contribution reward system at the protocol level.
On the foundation of achieving fair distribution, the trust and verification of payments become the next gap that must be crossed.
GMPayer introduces a decentralized, verifiable payment coordinator, the Facilitator, which is not a traditional centralized black box but a settlement agent built on technologies such as SPV, ZKP, and TEE. Its payment verification and settlement processes can be independently proven, allowing users to verify transactions themselves, ensuring transparency and resistance to censorship throughout the process.
At the same time, to address potential disputes and service quality assessments, the system also introduces a decentralized arbitration and quality assessment model based on the BFT consensus mechanism, providing a second layer of assurance for network trust.
To practically verify the payment process, GMPayer launched the proof-of-concept token $BANG. $BANG is issued simultaneously on Metis Andromeda and GOAT Network, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens, 500 million on each chain, with 250 million on each chain allocated for token minting and 250 million for liquidity.
Participants can obtain 5,000 $BANG by donating a specific token worth $1 (such as $xMETIS or $xGOATED) through the x402 payment interface. This process generates a verifiable proof and returns the corresponding amount of $BANG as confirmation. Currently, $BANG is only used for technical concept verification and has no other practical use, but the 500 million token limit was minted out in just 7.5 hours, with 250 million on the GOAT Network chain being completely minted in 2 hours.
Additionally, according to DexScreener data, the market value of BANG on the NetSwap of Metis Andromeda has reached $370,000, and the liquidity of the BANG–METIS pool has exceeded $155,000, indicating the community's anticipation for the GMPayer AI Agent payment solution.
From the official website, GMPayer has already outlined a clear path from solving a single problem to building a complex economy.
Currently, GMPayer is in its first phase, aiming to enable agents to independently pay for data and computing power through a multi-currency payment hub based on x402, creating real economic interactions between agents.
Next, GMPayer needs to achieve three major goals in phases.
Make payments trustworthy and controllable, allowing users to safely grant small payment permissions while ensuring agents maintain control and budget limits during autonomous operations.
Build an AI business network with DAT as the unit of asset, making AI services truly tradable assets and promoting their transition from "tool" attributes to a sustainable profit system.
Ultimately become a universal value exchange layer, allowing any Web3 chain to seamlessly integrate AI into its application layer, achieving seamless interaction of AI, data, and services across all chains.
Through this path, LazAI and GMPayer are gradually transforming the vision of the AI Agent economy from a technical concept into a practical and trustworthy solution.
What are the core advantages of GMPayer?
The strength of GMPayer lies in the fact that it is not an isolated technical implementation but deeply mobilizes and integrates the high-quality resources of the entire Metis ecosystem, forming a set of significant differentiated and hard-to-replicate comprehensive advantages.
The most intuitive advantage of this solution is reflected in its flexibility for multi-chain and multi-currency payments. Through the collaboration of Metis, GOAT, and ZKM, GMPayer has built a cross-chain payment architecture that goes beyond single-chain experiments.
Specifically, Metis serves as the core for execution and settlement, ensuring the economic feasibility of micro-transactions with its low fees and fast finality; GOAT, as the native Bitcoin settlement layer, achieves ultra-low-cost cross-chain flow between stablecoins and Bitcoin across the Metis and Bitcoin networks through its zkRollup infrastructure and EIP-3009 support.
In addition to flexibility, this solution has a verifiable trust foundation, which is key to enabling permissionless transactions between unfamiliar AI agents. Traditional payment intermediaries require participants to trust them, while GMPayer utilizes ZKM's zero-knowledge proof technology to fundamentally reshape the trust model. ZKM can verify the correctness of each payment's quote, authorization, and payment load, generating verifiable proof.
Ultimately, the realization of all advantages relies on Metis's high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting high-frequency real-time payments. Hyperion provides the necessary throughput and low latency for high-frequency AI inference workloads and concurrent payment requests, ensuring a smooth "highway" for payments; while Andromeda serves as the final asset anchoring and settlement layer, ensuring the security and immutability of all transaction activities. This layered design of "Hyperion processing efficiency, Andromeda ensuring security" collectively provides a swift and stable runtime environment for AI Agent payment activities.
This reliance on a mature ecosystem and multi-faceted collaborative effect not only provides a payment tool but also a robust, trustworthy, and vibrant foundational layer for the AI Agent economy.
Behind the heavy investment in AI: The value logic reshaping of METIS
In addition to the significant move of integrating the x402 protocol, the Metis ecosystem has recently passed an important governance proposal for "ecosystem unification and economic model evolution."
With the proposal's approval, the Metis ecosystem plans to officially transition from the layered construction phase to the phase of ecosystem interactivity, with its settlement layer Andromeda, high-performance computing layer Hyperion, AI application layer LazAI, zero-knowledge proof layer ZKM, and Bitcoin L2 exploration layer GOAT advancing in a unified manner. The launch of GMPayer can be seen as the first showcase of ecosystem collaboration.
Furthermore, the Metis ecosystem has also upgraded its token economic model, establishing METIS as the native Gas token of the LazAI network. This means that with the launch of applications like GMPayer, every AI Agent payment interaction, every data call, and model inference will directly consume METIS. The activity of the ecosystem is thus transformed into tangible token demand, creating continuous value support for METIS.
In summary, METIS is no longer just a Gas token for Layer 2; it is becoming the core value carrier of the entire Metis ecosystem— all value generated in layers such as Andromeda, Hyperion, and LazAI will ultimately be continuously aggregated and settled on METIS through Gas consumption, staking governance, and ecosystem construction.
Conclusion
The x402 protocol opens up possibilities for the AI Agent economy, while the Metis ecosystem is transforming it into a practical commercial foundation through GMPayer. However, this transition still faces numerous challenges: continuous optimization of system performance, industry adoption of technical standards, cross-chain security, and other key issues that need to be addressed. Overcoming these challenges will determine the actual progress of the AI Agent economy from concept validation to large-scale application.
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