The Hidden Cost of Agentic Commerce

As the agentic economy emerges and AI agents begin transacting at scale, the infrastructure we choose for these economic interactions will determine whether machine-to-machine commerce thrives or stalls. While the conversation often centers on payment protocols like x402, there's a more fundamental question that gets less attention: What is the actual cost of enabling billions of agentic transactions?

There is a hidden cost today to agentic commerce running onchain with x402 rails. What is it? Variable Costs.

There are always complaints about how traditional PSPs are so expensive i.e. the 2.x% + some amount of cents (e.g $0.3) which can result in many software sellers and physical merchants putting minimums on payments with a credit card, such as $5.

Blockchains historically have used a valuable gas token that has brought two levels of variability toward the cost of consuming block space:

1. Asset Value Variability

The price of the gas token goes up, it just became more expensive for all parties to participate.

2. Capacity-Based Surge Pricing

The capacity of the chain itself leads to surge in pricing as the chain protects itself against overuse by raising the gas price. This in turn makes it harder or more expensive to land transactions and generally has worked as a deterrent where most non-power users go elsewhere or trickle down to cheaper blockchains (historically).

Why SKALE Makes Sense for x402 Merchants

Why does SKALE make so much more sense for merchants and facilitators as the primary location to accept x402 payments in stablecoins and cryptocurrency?

The Credit System: Predictable Costs

SKALE Base, the first chain in SKALE's new expand program, uses a credit system that is backward compatible with EVM gas fees. This solves No. 1 from above by reducing variability in acquisition of compute resources. This aligns with how more traditional cloud providers rent resources in exchange for a flat fee. If 100,000,000 developers turn around and want to run OpenClaw bots on AWS t3.medium EC2 instances; I personally have never seen AWS surge price their instances.

Surge Protection Without the Pain

The second point is more nuanced. SKALE has the same protection that other blockchains do in regards to surge pricing. The differences?

High performance chains with massive compute limits (compared to traditional EVM) are capable of handling a much higher load before seeing the protective increase. This makes it easier to avoid small, choppy surges that can be painful on your wallet.

The part that is truly powerful is the horizontal scalability. This is how cloud giants maintain (and often are actually able to make prices cheaper over time). The ability to continuously supply more and more compute means there is no cap when demand starts to grow; like we often see with other chains.

How does this work?

SKALE is natively multi-chain through an application called SKALE Manager which is a set of smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (SKALE Ethereum) and Coinbase's Base L2 (SKALE Base). The smart contracts have a pool of validator Supernodes registered to them which in turn are used to dynamically provision SKALE Chains when the smart contracts ask for them.

With the new credit system, it's possible that as the agentic economy begins to grow agents themselves will buy SKALE Chains directly and continue to add support for more chains to keep their costs to a minimum and maximize profit.

The Economics of Expansion

This model isn't unique to blockchain infrastructure—it's how successful businesses scale in the physical world as well.

Physical Retail Expansion

Consider a grocery store that reaches capacity during peak hours. They don't surge price their milk when the checkout lines get long. Instead, they open more registers, expand their footprint, or open new locations. The upfront cost of expansion pays dividends in the form of captured demand that would otherwise go elsewhere.

The store that expands when demand rises captures the growing market. The store that stays fixed-size loses customers to competitors who can serve them.

Cloud Provider Economics

The same logic powers AWS, Cloudflare, and other cloud giants. When demand spikes, they don't just raise prices—they provision more servers, build new data centers, and expand capacity. This allows them to:

• Capture growing demand rather than turning customers away
• Economies of scale that often let them lower prices over time
• Provide predictable pricing that attracts long-term customers

SKALE's Expansion Model

SKALE operates on this same principle. When agentic transaction volume grows, the network can provision additional SKALE Chains to handle the load—without surge pricing that would drive users away.

For merchants and facilitators building on SKALE, this means predictable costs at scale. The infrastructure grows with your business, not against it.

Conclusion

The agentic economy will be built on infrastructure that can handle billions of transactions predictably. Variable costs—whether from gas token volatility or capacity-based surge pricing—are a hidden tax on agent-to-agent commerce that makes economic modeling nearly impossible.

SKALE's credit system and horizontal scalability offer a path forward: predictable costs that scale with demand, not against it. Like cloud providers and successful retailers, the winning strategy is expansion, not extraction.

As I explored in The Role of Pay-Per-Tool in an Agentic World, the future of agentic systems depends on infrastructure that can scale sustainably. SKALE provides that foundation for x402 payments.

x402 on SKALE, DM me and I'll help you integrate.