Coinbase

Tap Global, a company whose shares are traded on London’s AIM market, has released a short but highly revealing statement. Its new product, called Tap Earn, managed to attract $3.5 million in assets under management since launching in early May. For giants like Coinbase or Binance, that amount would barely register as statistical noise. But for Tap Global, whose audience is still measured in hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions of users, it is a significant signal.

The product was officially announced on May 7, and within just a couple of weeks clients had already deposited $3.5 million into it. If that pace were extrapolated over a quarter or a year, the numbers could materially reshape the company’s financial profile. More importantly, however, customers are voting with their feet — or rather, with their wallets — for a model fundamentally different from what cryptocurrency platforms have traditionally offered.

Tap Earn provides variable yield on crypto assets and stablecoins. In practice, this means users can open the mobile app, deposit their Bitcoin, Ether, or dollar-pegged tokens, and begin earning interest on them. There is no need to trade, monitor charts, or stress over volatility — users simply deposit assets and earn passive income. The idea itself is as old as finance, but in the crypto world it has long been associated with risky decentralized finance protocols and infamous yield platforms that promised high returns before disappearing along with users’ funds. Tap Global is attempting to offer a similar product, but within a regulated framework and through a publicly traded company.

The most interesting aspect of Tap Global’s announcement is not the $3.5 million figure itself, but what it represents. CEO Arsen Torosian described the launch of Tap Earn as the beginning...

Imagine a world where software pays software. Not people sending money to people, not a human buying a subscription to a service, but one line of code automatically settling with another line of code in a fraction of a second and for a fraction of a cent. It sounds like science fiction, but this is exactly the reality Coinbase is building right now through the x402 protocol. And the protocol’s latest upgrade — the introduction of batch settlements — brings that science fiction closer than ever to the everyday workflow of thousands of developers.

Why is this even necessary? The answer lies in the nature of artificial intelligence. Modern AI agents are resource-hungry creatures. They constantly need access to models, computing power, API calls to databases, and information from external sources. And all of that costs money. When there are hundreds or thousands of such operations per hour, and each one costs mere fractions of a cent, the traditional blockchain economy — with fees attached to every transaction — becomes pointless. Sending an on-chain transaction that costs a dollar just to pay one-tenth of a cent is absurd. That is exactly the absurdity this new solution eliminates.

The mechanism implemented by x402 is elegant in its simplicity. Instead of pushing every tiny transaction through the blockchain, the system bundles many small payments into a single package and settles the final balance with one transaction. It’s similar to how a restaurant doesn’t run to the bank after every cup of coffee sold but deposits the day’s revenue in one payment at the end of the day.

Technically, it works like this. The buyer — an AI agent or service that needs resources — first places ERC-20 tokens into an on-chain escrow. This acts as a...