x402 PoC on Filecoin Beam

The PoC Protocol

  • x402 paywalling will work at the piece level. The Content Creator will add a piece on FWSS and pay for storage and egress using the existing payment rails.
  • Additionally, in the piece metadata, they will include
    • Price for x402 paywall
    • x402 Payout Address (Base address to being with) that belongs to the content creator
  • When a request comes in from a client for the paywalled piece, the client will need to include x402 payment equal to the price set in the piece metadata. The payment will be executed using the x402 Facilitator on Base Network.
  • Once payment is received by the Content Creator’s x402 Payout Address, the file/piece will be sent to the client by Filecoin Beam. Egress will be recorded by Filecoin Beam using Pay Per Byte and the content creator will be charged for the egress.

Remarks

  • The x402 payment will happen on Base initially. This gives super fast finality and means we can be listed in all the x402 community tooling.
  • The content creator receives the full x402 payment in this PoC. None of the x402 payment goes to Filecoin Beam, none goes to the Storage Provider. Separately, the content creator pays for their storage and egress through Filecoin Pay using the payment rails we have already built. N.B. This is like how many business work: the content creator pays for their infra or cloud infra services while monetising their content/offering on top of it. E.g. Financial Times pays for their cloud bills while taking subscriptions from their users. Subscription revenue must be more than infra outgoings.
  • A v2 could see the x402 payment being split between the rewards for the content creator and the egress costs so that the client doesn’t have to pay for egress up front. I.e. egress could be done with “lazy” retroactive payments from the x402 payment.
  • A v2 could see FOC take a cut of the x402 payment as a “platform fee”.
  • If a performant Filecoin x402 facilitator emerges and finality becomes fast enough on Filecoin, then the content creator could add a Filecoin payout address instead of a Base one.
  • Until there is private data / ACL on FWSS, clients can circumvent the x402 paywall.
  • While this PoC doesn’t include a revenue stream for Filecoin Beam or SPs, the hope is that this feature will lead to more egress and storage being bought on FOC. In any case, it doesn’t feel right for the infra providers to be taking a cut of the x402 payment which is linked to the quality of the content, not the quality of its infra.

x402 Hackathon

https://www.x402hackathon.com/

App to build: A x402 integration for FOC (CDN + storage layer), rewarding content creators through x402

Selling point: Given x402 technology, demo an integration into a decentralized cloud/storage platform

Deliverables

  • e2e Flow for content creator to upload a file with a recipient x402 address and a price
    • CLI based
    • UI based
    • SDK based?
  • e2e Flow for end user to fetch data with x402 payment
  • Flow for content creator to see how many requests have been made for each of their files and how much they have earned.
    • UI based
    • CLI based?