FilBeam & x402 and MCPs

Notes from my conversation with lanzafame. He is building a project allowing users to quickly create a funded wallet with a credit card, while not having to wait for the credit card TX to settle. The service automatically top-ups the wallet when the balance is depleted. (We think the service will be available to users in Q1 2026 at best.)

  • Coinbase and Cloudflare are launching x402 Foundation

MCP server for FilBeam retrievals

Idea behind data comms MCP - build an MCP around my dataset to allow users to query my dataset and pay me for that.

I have a dataset on FWSS & FilBeam, it’s not indexed by Google or other search engines. I want to use my dataset with Claude locally, giving Claude direct access to my dataset in a dataset-native way. So I wrap it in MCP running locally (it can also run remotely), and the MCP handles the logic of going from LLM language to doing FilBeam requests, handling what the dataset is, etc. and passing that back.

  • Running MCP on FilBeam is easier for the user to set up.
  • Running MCP locally allows the user to cache the data fetched from FilBeam locally. This is better, especially when running the model locally.

USP for FilBeam: handle authentication and payments for FilBeam requests.

Example: Claude often puts /tx instead of /message into Filfox URLs when quering the state.

The MCP ensures the details are always handled the same way. Also the user can provider auth like access tokens in the MCP config, so that they don’t have to specify in every conversation.

We can ask Claude to create this for us.

x402 gateway to Filecoin data

x402 uses the concept of a facilitator that’s settling payments. Coinbase can settle USDC payments on their Base L2 rooted in Ethereum in less than 200ms.

Pinata already has x402 for upload and download..

https://docs.pinata.cloud/api-reference/endpoint/x402/pin

USP:

  • Pitch to content & dataset producers: Filecoin Beam allows you to monetize access to your data stored on Filecoin Onchain Cloud. Point FilBeam to your data stored on Filecoin and watch the payments trickle into your USDFC wallet that’s paying for storage. FilBeam supports many USD-based stablecoins, so you don't have to deal with the complexity of DEX/CEX swaps yourself.
  • Pitch to data clients: Use the USDC you already have in your wallet to pay for and download data stored on Filecoin.

Details:

  • The user wants to earn USDFC on Filecoin so that they can pay the fees for storing their data on Filecoin.
  • This assumes users want to store on Filecoin, they are already storing data on Filecoin, and want to expose this data to users outside of Filecoin.
  • FilBeam can do the bridging, so that consumers can use USDC, they don’t have to deal with anything Filecoin-specific.

Implementation notes:

  • FilBeam can either pay Coinbase run a facilitator for us, or we can run our own facilitator (there is an open-source version).
    • The OSS facilitator can settle on multiple L1s.

Filecoin Beam allows you to monetize access to your data stored on Filecoin Onchain Cloud. It provides access to data customers with various stablecoins, and bridges the payments from other USD-based stablecoins to USDFC.

FilBeam unlocks paid retrievals to everyone with a stable-coin wallet. Expand the funnel for content producers to consumers beyond Filecoin/USDFC ecosystem.

FilBeam deals with the complexities of accepting payments in dozens of different stablecoins, giving content producers income in a single currency - USDFC.\

We must be careful about (not?) becoming a money transmitter.
https://stripe.com/ae/resources/more/what-is-a-money-transmitter

E.g. money transmitter licenses in Estonia require you to have at least 300k EUR in capital at all times.

A note on performance of retrievals: CDN-like performance is not required by LLM agents and scrapers. Coinbase's x402 facilitator settles transactions in around 200ms. LLM agents need seconds to minutes to finish their assigned tasks.