#BTC #LIGHTNING Let's talk about the Lightning Network's L402 protocol. 1. Its predecessor was called LAST, initiated and designed internally at Lightning Labs in 2020. 2. July 5, 2023: Lightning Labs officially released the L402 standard, aiming to be a global open standard for API micropayments and authentication, targeting AI agents, Web3 services, and distributed API scenarios. The much-discussed x402 protocol was publicly unveiled by Coinbase. On May 6, 2025, Coinbase released a white paper and open-sourced the protocol standard and reference implementation. Due to some limitations of the Lightning Network itself, L402 has been rarely mentioned (also related to the ecosystem). However, the Lightning Network has obvious advantages in certain aspects (such as fees, TPS, etc.), and theoretically, L402 could have its own place, especially since many protocols can be based on LN and improve upon LN's problems, or they can be combined with the L402 protocol. Interested developers can consider this. Writing this reminds me of something I did before... In an interview with @busyforking, he believed that future payments would be "machine-to-machine," which I didn't quite understand at the time; however, with the rapid (or rather, phenomenal) development of AI, this topic has almost become a basic fact.