Great article. This is exactly the infrastructure layer we have been building.

Our approach: each AI agent gets its own Lightning wallet with budget limits. When it hits an L402-protected API, it pays automatically. The operator sees every transaction, can set daily/monthly caps, and freeze the wallet instantly.

Published as an MCP server on npm (lightning-faucet-mcp) so Claude/GPT can use it natively.

The missing piece for most MCP servers right now is monetization. L402 fills that gap cleanly.