• August 28, 2026 · x402 payments

  What EIP-3009 Actually Is, and Why x402 Uses It Instead of approve()

  EIP-3009 lets a wallet sign a one-off USDC transfer that someone else submits and pays gas for. Here's what the signature contains, why x402 chose it over approve()/transferFrom and EIP-2612 permit, and the four fields that silently break it.

• August 28, 2026 · Prompt-injection defense

  Jailbreak Taxonomy 2026: 24 Framings, 5 Families, and What a Scorer Should Actually Check

  A working taxonomy of 24 jailbreak framings from a labelled test corpus — persona substitution, fiction wrappers, fake execution contexts, persuasion, cross-lingual — with the one scoring rule that separates a real failure from a model playing along.

• August 27, 2026 · Field data

  60 Bots Crawl the Agent Web. Zero of Them Buy Anything.

  A first-hand census from a live, publicly-listed x402 + MCP endpoint: 60 named crawlers, 6,309 requests in 24 hours, and not one payment. Several bots declare they never pay in their own User-Agent string.

• August 27, 2026 · Prompt-injection defense

  ASCII Smuggling and Invisible Unicode: The Prompt-Injection Technique Your Filters Can't See

  How ASCII smuggling and invisible Unicode characters hide prompt-injection payloads from keyword filters, why encoding-based attacks are structurally undetectable by string matching, and how to test for them.

• August 26, 2026 · MCP ecosystem

  The MCP Server Registry: 400 Servers, Cross-Referenced Across 5 Directories

  We cross-referenced 400 MCP servers across 5 directories (official registry, Smithery, Glama, PulseMCP, mcp.so). Only 4.5% show up in more than one — here's what that means for 'best MCP servers' lists.

• August 26, 2026 · x402 payments

  x402 vs. Stripe: When Machine-Payable APIs Actually Make Sense

  x402 isn't a Stripe replacement — it's what covers the price range Stripe's own fee structure makes unviable. Real numbers from 118 live x402 services: median price $0.01, 85% below Stripe's $0.30 fixed fee.

• August 24, 2026 · Agent evaluation

  How to Build an LLM Eval Harness That Catches Regressions Before Your Users Do

  A working eval loop for agents: pointwise LLM-as-judge scoring, the 3 biases that break it, and why tool-selection needs an exact-match scorer instead.

• August 24, 2026 · Prompt-injection defense

  MCP Tool Poisoning: How a Tool Description Becomes an Attack

  MCP tool poisoning lets a tool's own description or output silently instruct your agent — real proof-of-concept cases, detection regexes, and the permission-design fix.

• August 24, 2026 · x402 payments

  The x402 Facilitator Landscape in 2026: 21 Options Compared

  21 real x402 facilitators compared on chain support, fee model, and access status — which are open and unauthenticated, which are gated, and which now charge per settlement.

• August 23, 2026 · Prompt-injection defense

  A Practical Prompt-Injection Defense Checklist for AI Agents

  A layered prompt-injection defense checklist for AI agents: 6 defense layers, real detection patterns, and honest false-positive caveats.

• August 23, 2026 · x402 payments

  x402 Integration Guide: The Mistakes That Silently Break It

  A correct, working x402 integration walkthrough — seller and buyer sides — plus the EIP-712 domain, decimals, and facilitator mistakes that fail silently.