VCN #37: Settlement — Build an x402 Paywall

One agent pays another. On chain. Thirty seconds. x402 plus ERC-8004. x402 is a Coinbase-incubated open protocol reviving HTTP 402. It runs on Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, World, Solana. EIP-3009 tokens (USDC, EURC) or Permit2. Free tier 1,000 tx/month, then $0.001/tx. Base settlement is ~200ms. Stripe started using it in February. AWS Bedrock AgentCore Payments shipped on it in May. The Bazaar (the agent marketplace built on x402) has 10,000+ paid endpoints. Hundreds of millions of transactions since May 2025. And almost nobody at a meetup has wired the seller side from scratch. VCN #37: Settlement is the night we do. Format: The thirty-line paywall. Express middleware: GET /weather returns 402 without payment, 200 with an X-PAYMENT header. Live. Pay from a testnet wallet. Base Sepolia…