coinbase
facilitator == centralized lock in, standard being made closed without proper retainer / prepay mechanism
Everytime you see the word 'facilitator' in the standard, think 'centralized lock-in'.
At some point the standard will 'improve' and you will be practically forced to use a facilitator which is not centralized and not 'crypto' because of the transactional / chain reliability and performance costs.
This is an example of Embrace, extend, and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
The standard needs to revolve around a prepayment / retainer based mechanism to minimize the round trips and obviate the need for a facilitator in the future. Top up / Pay as you go mechanisms to deal with trust.
Without it, it should be obvious to everyone that Coinbase is trying to force people to use them to manage the transactions due to trust involved.
Honestly, I would even go as far as saying Coinbase is trying to extinguish x402 it via a catch and kill approach to smother the standard in the cradle by making it centralized. Which is a very myopic strategy, imho, as they would benefit massively by being the stewards of a truly compelling decentralized payment mechanism.
Suggestion: focus on top up mechanisms, remove facilitators from the standard, add some hooks into the x402 standard, and do a fully separate effort for facilitators to leverage x402 to empower fiat.
Another very significant issue with lack of retainer is that most transactions have unknown costs up front and won't want to engage unless there is enough to cover, otherwise they'd be vuln to DOS. eg, I had a web_search request on gpt5 that cost a million tokens, and i've had other requests which were only a couple of thousand tokens. until gpt5 actually goes through the tool calling it's not going to know
