Riot Games recently capped replay downloads at 10 per hour. Why? Because a wave of vibe-coded tools started scraping replays at scale. The company reportedly considered pulling API access entirely, but that would’ve punished the people the API exists for. Their community. The creators, analysts, and players who just want their own games. So they picked a blunt instrument. A time-based cap that hits everyone equally (including the person it’s supposed to protect). This is the pattern @0xVatsaShah and I are seeing everywhere now. Agents are hitting APIs that were designed for humans. Providers face a bad binary choice: shut it all down, or eat the abuse and the infra bill. However, there’s a third option. Instead of treating every automated request as anonymous and suspect, you let the agent prove there’s an accountable, opted-in human behind it. Now you can ask the question that actually matters: not “is this a bot?” but “whose bot is this, and do they have a reason to be here?” Legitimate agents keep access. Scrapers hit a wall. Nobody has to rate-limit their own users into frustration. That’s what we’re building at Valiron.

from the day i met @0xVatsaShah last november at YC in SF, up to today, we have met 6/ 7 days every single week. no exception. sometimes we met multiple times a day. we met on holidays. we worked weekends. we said no to plans. all in pursuit of building something incredible. this next month is going to be our BIGGEST yet! we have some really exciting announcements coming over the next few weeks. STAY TUNED 📺

The x402 story is a familiar one. Kubernetes was originally incubated by Google. Thirteen months later, it moved to the Linux Foundation. That was 2014 and 2015. Today, 82% of container users are running Kubernetes in production. Between now and then, Kubernetes transformed cloud infra that the vast majority of companies building at the frontier depend on. x402 is following a similar path. In 2025, it was incubated at Coinbase. This July, fourteen months after it was initially developed, it was handed over to the Linux Foundation's stewardship. This month, 75-million transactions have taken place on x402 payment rails. Full stop. All of the frontier players in tech are evaluating x402, writing about it, or including it in their stack: - Stripe - Ramp - AWS - OpenAI I'm excited to look back in 10 years and see how this story ends.