In June 2026, Cloudflare reported automated web traffic had overtaken human traffic, driven in part by the explosive growth of AI agents. HUMAN Security’s 2026 benchmark report found that agentic AI traffic grew 7,851% in one year. Our future is more agents. Since agents don't read ads or subscribe to services the way humans do, how will we monetize the increasingly agent-powered web?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a cross-platform protocol to empower agents to access data and tools. If you have valuable data or functionality, exposing it as an MCP tool is now an established approach to making it accessible to agents. But how do you get paid? Traditional accounts, API keys, and billing relationships introduce friction for agents that want to purchase a service on demand. The x402 payment protocol comes to the rescue, enabling payments via cryptocurrency (USDC in this scenario) with no account and no API key.

In this fast-paced talk, we will briefly review the role and history of MCP, contrasting it with WebMCP, APIs, and CLIs for agent use. Then we'll show how to weave in the x402 protocol to expose an MCP tool to the world that you can charge for, but without requiring an account or API key.

Our example is real. Since January 1, 2022, I’ve co-run the Attackee Project, a honeypot that has logged tens of millions of attempts to break into our systems. We’ll turn that data into a new premium feature on the ipfacts.com MCP server: check whether an IP address is on our "naughty list" (i.e., tried to log into our honeypot), and agents pay per call (in USDC) via x402.

You’ll walk away knowing when MCP is the right choice for agent access, and see the x402 pattern for charging agents per call.