Over the last week, the Xosphere has blown up with developments about channels.
It was kicked off by Stripe-backed Tempo chain’s announcement of MPP, an important development in agentic commerce.
Previously Coinbase’s x402 standard was the most well received, which (quite naively) did an on-chain payment for every action, such as an API call. Because these actions can occur quite rapidly, it seemed like great justification for high tps blockchains (leading Stripe to even publish an article saying we may need billions of TPS)
If you’ve followed the Nervos project for sometime, you’ll know how stupid this all sounds.
MPP was different, it opens a payment channel (https://www.nervos.org/knowledge-base/what_are_payment_channels) which functions similar to bar tab. The customer (agent) locks up some money with the AI platform and then draws down their balance as they consume resources from the AI platform.
There is a single on-chain transaction to open the channel and a single transaction to close it. All other payments are off-chain, secured by the underlying blockchain (sound familiar?) Coincidentally, someone casually implemented the exact same design on CKB back in October (https://talk.nervos.org/t/web3/9621)
This is all positive for the project, as Perun channels on CKB have been in development for 3.5 years, steadily progressing in capability and Fiber channels have been in development for 2 years.
Here are some noteworthy posts showing developments from around the industry
Cardano https://x.com/ch1bo_/status/2035345707247280526?s=20
Bitcoin Lightning https://x.com/roasbeef/status/2035093669426975093?s=20
Ethereum https://x.com/pedrouid/status/2034762773683388916?s=20
Solana https://x.com/bezzenberger/status/2034349664867160367?s=20
Tempo https://x.com/liamihorne/status/2034278773701619983?s=20
