Who told the agent it could spend? An agent calls a paid MCP tool. The gateway returns a price. The wallet checks the amount against spending rules. If approved, the agent retries with payment proof. The gateway verifies the payment and the MCP service executes the tool. Stateless MCP + x402 make the flow explicit, scalable, and easier to govern. Read more from Soheima Canton (AAIF Ambassador):

Agents should understand the economics of their actions. MCP + x402 allows agents to know what things cost, what they’re worth and when to stop. Proud of this article I wrote published for the @AgenticAIFdn

Meet @sstrenev. He has been building in fintech for years. His latest startup tackles one of DeFi's most persistent problems: the experience is still too hard for everyday users. Multiple wallets. Gas tokens. Fragmented interfaces. @defied_money removes that friction entirely through account abstraction, gas sponsorship, and clean UX — giving users a neobanking experience while interacting directly with public, permissionless protocols through their own smart accounts. Defied’s mission is making stablecoins, yield, and DeFi as simple as online banking, without giving up self-custody. The team is heads-down in the pre-launch phase ahead of a closed beta, with 1,000+ users already on the waitlist. Bulgaria is their first market, with broader EU expansion to follow. On why Base: "Very fast transactions, all the major DeFi protocols have deployments on Base, giving users access to great yield opportunities, as well as tokenized stocks and FX swaps between @circle’s USDC and EURC. Strong support and opportunities for builders. We're looking to use Base as our home chain." - Stan Trenev (@sstrenev), Founder @defied_money is built on @base.

Native Account Abstraction (EIP-8130) is live to test today at ✨ ✨ - 63% cheaper USDC transfers than ERC-4337 - Key rotation + quantum-ready auth - Accounts that work across the EVM ecosystem Coming to @base in September with the Cobalt hard fork 💎 in collab with @Optimism , @coinbase , @WalletConnect

lots of conversations about base over the last week. wanted to share my candid take after a week of listening and a lot of reflection over the last 6 months. first off - in case it’s not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I spent 2024 and 2025 making a two pronged bet to bring base to the world: (1) builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; (2) adoption would be driven by new onchain-native social experiences - creators, content, messaging. imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social. builders did drive the next wave of crypto adoption - prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins - but social was not at the center of it. in fact, the entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards - farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins - disintegrated completely. I was wrong - whether it was timing wrong (is $ansem a creator coin?) or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, i was definitively wrong. the collateral damage was pretty bad! and this year has been an exercise in eating shit. we realized how our focus on social had meant that base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical - we had perps (shoutout avantis!) and prediction markets (shoutout limitless!), but both were well behind scaled competitors. and we had a lot of room to improve in unlocking base as a platform for tokenization and payments that really worked for enterprises. people lost confidence, and CT spectators reminded me weekly of all of my mistakes as often as they could. it felt bad man, still feels bad. but if there’s one thing i’ve learned from the last decade of building in this space, it’s that when things feel the worst, the best thing to do is just put your head down and build. so that’s what i’m doing. I refocused my time and attention back to the chain away from the app, started writing code again, shipped a bunch of stuff (azul, beryl, b20, privacy, ledgers) and questioned a bunch of my assumptions: does crypto need social to grow? does base need an app? can base be bigger than coinbase? I thought for a long time that social was the only thing that could drive the sort of viral growth to get crypto to a billion people. unsurprisingly, I now believe that’s wrong. It’s clear that better money is more than enough - we are seeing this live with stablecoins, predictions, perpetuals, tokenization and i only expect it to accelerate. I am now focused on bringing a billion people onchain just by making global finance actually work. on the app, my focus is on building base into the blockchain for global finance. to that end, i’ve handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here to make it the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen, including expanding beyond the base ecosystem in ways that tbh i won’t love as the leader of base. it’s incredibly hard to grow a decentralized network inside of a big public corporation. and i feel like much of the discourse on CT over the last week is downstream of this. the following things can be true: (1) base (and i) love memes and (2) brian probably won’t ever bullpost memes on the tl (this activity is illegal once you’re over 40 years of age). it’s weird and we’re working through it as we continue to decentralize base, which has been our commitment from the beginning. we’re going to build base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century. we will surely have formidable competitors (welcome robinhood and stripe!) and people may abandon our cause, but we welcome the competition and believe it’s our duty to win the respect and commitment of those who rally to our banner.  in 2026, this concretely means three things: winning trading, payments, and agents. [continued in the reply]