The Race Above x402: Louis Amira of ATXP on Agent Commerce and Stablecoin Settlement

A pitch with no protocol revenue

Louis Amira says the company told investors it would build a protocol for agents that "is not the end of the company because nobody is going to make money in the protocol layer." He says the same holds for others in the space: the X402 Foundation is "basically a charity," and MPP is "not making any money at that layer" because it needs to be free in the way HTTP is free.

Stepping back from the protocol

According to Louis Amira, ATXP launched on Base at roughly the same time Coinbase launched x402, and MPP came later. A couple of months ago the company announced it no longer needed to work on the protocol, because x402, MPP and other options "do the job" and are better than what it planned to build. He now describes ATXP as a transaction platform, "a way that you can stitch a bunch of stuff together."

Amira says the name stands for agent transaction protocol and was picked on the expectation that it will fade from view, the way most people type HTTP without knowing what it stands for.

Traction and its limits

Louis Amira says ATXP publicly announced more than a million accounts created, by humans and by agents. It has topped the x402 and Stripe MPP leaderboards by 5 to 20x. Still, he says early agent commerce was mostly birthday songs and party tricks, "not the takeoff that we had hoped for," and that about 3,000 companies can now do that kind of thing. He calls token maxing "the wrong thing to measure."

The last mile

For Louis Amira, the real opportunity is the gap between recommending an action and carrying it out. Builders take products "99% of the way there," he says, while he wants an easy button that says "approved, go do the thing." He recalls a line from interviewing at Ramp: it is better for a business to save the dollar than to collect 3% in rewards. He predicts that in 15 years people will have an agent that saves money, frees up time and earns money for them.