The user-facing decentralized web — wallets, identity, UX, and adoption.
An agent hits an API, gets HTTP 402, signs a stablecoin authorization, and a facilitator settles it on-chain for a fraction of a cent. We trace one real payment on Base down to the gas — and where the trust actually sits.
Render just voted to route 60,000 Salad GPUs' payments through a token burn; Akash auctions its 234 GPUs per-block on-chain. Two opposed pricing mechanisms, live H100 quotes, and the burn-vs-emission math the equilibrium story skips.
Story raised $140M to make IP programmable for the AI era. We read its chain: 6.46M registered IP assets, 230,300 licenses ever minted, one week of royalties totaling $10 — plus the LAP/LRP royalty math and the precompile at 0x0101 that computes the graph.