stripe built a protocol for AI agents to stream payments. coinbase built one too. we picked Stripe's. here's why. @x402 by coinbase lets agents pay for services directly from a crypto wallet but every single request requires a checksum and other algorithms to process the payment. that's a lot of overhead for usage-based billing where payments are happening constantly. @mpp by stripe lets agents set up a session once and stream payments continuously, no on-chain transaction for every API call and for usage billing that's exactly what you want. both solve autonomous AI payments but MPP is minimalist and X402 is full-stack. For what we're building, minimalist wins. @stellarorgtools is migrating our usage billing infrastructure to MPP as we prepare for mainnet. We're open source payment infrastructure that lets online merchants accept payments with instant settlement and near-zero fees. → stellartools.dev more updates coming 🏴‍☠️

i've heard the word encryption misused way too many times. saw a dev make a POST request, get back a url like /claim?id=dx3f8a and call it an encrypted link that's just a random id stored in a database. there was no key, no algorithm, nothing. real encryption is readable data plus a key, run through a cryptography algorithm to produce an unreadable output. and you need that same key to reverse it. a random url that's hard to guess is just a token. call it that.