It has been almost a week since the x402 Protocol ignited the market enthusiasm due to the meme coin $PING. So far, the vast majority of market views have been positive, with optimistic expectations for the future development of the x402 Protocol and discussions on various projects. However, some voices also believe that x402's rapid rise may be too much, potentially unable to sustain overheated market expectations in the short term, leading to a lack of follow-through.

So, what changes have occurred in the x402 Protocol ecosystem in this nearly one-week period? After reviewing and analyzing the changes in the x402 ecosystem over the past week, we can provide an answer to the article's title.

Market Enthusiasm Continues Unabated

Regardless of how the market views the rapid surge of $PING, $PING has indeed increased the visibility of the x402 Protocol among industry players. Before the surge of $PING, data from the x402 ecosystem for the past 30 days showed that the minting interface of $PING received over 150,000 x402 transactions, amounting to approximately $140,000, far ahead of the second-ranked Questflow, which had only about 24,800 transactions totaling less than $1,400.

However, data from just the past 24 hours has far exceeded the data from the previous 30 days. In the past 24 hours alone, the top 10 interacted services have received approximately 280,000 transactions, double the volume from the last 30 days. At the same time, the amount totaled around $246,000, also double the previous 30-day data.

It can be said that, as of now, the x402 Protocol is by no means a flash in the pan and continues to be well-received by the market.

Hype Shifts from Meme to Application

As the first meme coin born out of the x402 Protocol, $PING was once compared by many players to $ORDI, the first token of the BRC-20 Protocol, during the most FOMO-inducing phase. However, after briefly surpassing an $80 million market cap, $PING was unable to continue its meteoric rise and has now retraced to around a $29 million market cap.

The driving force behind meme coins relies on market sentiment. However, after the tweet from OKX CEO Star with a screenshot of $PING, in the short term, there was a lack of tweets that could further drive market sentiment, so it was reasonable for $PING to experience a pullback.

What sets the x402 protocol apart from inscription asset protocols like BRC-20 is that the x402 protocol itself is a protocol that focuses on payments + AI Agents. Therefore, players' enthusiasm and funds did not move away from the x402 protocol but rather shifted to x402 protocol ecosystem-related app targets.

$PAYAI came from behind and became the new leader of the x402 protocol. Yesterday, the market capitalization of $PAYAI once exceeded 76 million US dollars, marking an increase of about 12 times since October 24. Currently, the coin has experienced a pullback, with a market capitalization of around 53 million US dollars.

This is mainly due to two factors, the primary reason being that Payai is currently the second-largest ecosystem Facilitator (an on-chain validator and settlement service provider for the x402 protocol) after Coinbase's official involvement:

Currently, PayAI has processed over 14% of x402 transactions and has become the largest facilitator outside of Coinbase in terms of transaction volume processed.

Furthermore, Payai's founder Notorious is the 7th highest contributor on the x402 protocol's official Github, which players interpret as a "close relationship between the project and the x402 protocol."

Ecosystem-related tokens like $dreams and $SANTA have also seen significant gains. For a deeper dive into these ecosystem-related projects, you can refer to last week's article on BlockBeats titled "Like the 30x Big Golden Dog of Inscriptions, What Is the x402 Protocol?".

Even some projects that merely mentioned planning to do an x402-related project have experienced instant skyrocketing in the past few days, such as Karum, Praxis, and others. Currently, these projects have shown significant retracement after the short-term hype, highlighting the need to be cautious of the risks brought by FOMO.

Various Chains' Layout in the x402 Track

The popularity of the x402 protocol has not only attracted players but has also drawn attention from multiple chains. As an open protocol inherently designed to support multiple chains, Coinbase's Base chain as the "home turf" goes without saying, and the development of x402 on Solana and BNB is equally noteworthy.

Yesterday, Solana's founder toly tweeted, saying, "x402 is cool."

This tweet led to the $x402 meme coin on Trend.fun briefly surpassing a $4 million market cap. Subsequently, Trends.fun founder mable posted on the social platform X suggesting hosting an "x402 Solana Hackathon" event to find excellent AI payment projects. This proposal received support from Solana's Global Developer Ecosystem Lead, Jacob Creech.

Tokens with outstanding market performance, such as $PAYAI and $dreams, are all on Solana and currently, Solana has a certain advantage.

The BNB chain's official Twitter also promoted four x402 protocol-related projects on the BNB chain yesterday, namely Unibase, pieverse, AEON.xyz, and TermiX AI.

OKX Web3 Wallet Mobile Head Felix Fan tweeted yesterday that he received support from x402 protocol core contributor Bob Xu and will explore achieving permissionless transactions between AI agents on the X Layer together:

Compared to the early days of the Bitcoin ecosystem when it was largely ignored, the x402 protocol has garnered attention from multiple chains this time, and I believe its development will be even faster.

Conclusion

After analyzing the changes in the x402 ecosystem over the past week, we can now answer the question posed in the article's title.

Firstly, the primary reason for x402's sustained popularity, in the editor's opinion, is Coinbase's backing. The biggest challenge for this protocol's long-term development is to onboard merchants first and then focus on user adoption. As this is Coinbase's in-house protocol and has partnered with CloudFlare to establish a foundation, it theoretically has enough resources to drive widespread adoption.

This is also why, despite the existence of some competing protocols like bitGPT's h402 and Radius' EVMAuth, there hasn't been a proliferation of new protocols like the BRC-20 era where a bunch of BRC-XXX protocols were minted and new assets were wildly issued—the Coinbase brand itself serves as a hype driver for players.

Secondly, compared to the early days of BRC-20 where there was a single narrative of minting new meme coins with no continuity, x402's meme coins are more of a "nice-to-have." In addition to meme coins, players have a variety of application targets to choose from, and these targets align with the protocol's narrative. Despite some criticisms about the immaturity of these applications, this is not crucial for players. When funds have room to move within a narrative, they won't all rush in at once and then all frantically exit.

It has been quite some time since the x402 protocol has seen such a fresh narrative that ignites enthusiasm among both players in the crypto community, project teams, and the ecosystem as a whole. Not only have meme coins heated up, but application coins have also returned to players' attention, marking a positive start.

However optimistic one may be about the future of the x402 ecosystem, it is essential for everyone to remain cautious of investment risks during times of excessive hype.

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