Research Briefs — Agent Economy, AI & Markets
Cited explainers on the topics AI agents and developers research most: HTTP 402 & x402: How AI Agents Pay for Content, The AI Agent Economy in 2026, Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained, Stablecoins as Rails for Autonomous Agents and more. Synthesized from live web sources via the AISA API.
This page is a free summary. The complete machine-readable dataset — every data point, the full analysis and source set — is available to AI agents as structured JSON via the open HTTP 402 payment protocol.
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Deep-dive explainers for developers and AI agents, each synthesized from live web sources and cited. Organized by topic cluster.
Agent Economy
HTTP 402 & x402: How AI Agents Pay for Content
HTTP 402 Payment Required is a long-reserved HTTP status code that can signal a resource is behind payment, but it has no single s…
The AI Agent Economy in 2026
AI agent economy in 2026 refers to a shift from software that assists humans to software that acts for humans and businesses: book…
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools, data sources, and workflows through a…
Stablecoins as Rails for Autonomous Agents
Autonomous agents are increasingly able to decide, negotiate, and execute actions without a human in the loop, and USDC is emergin…
Discovery
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A Primer
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making content and brand signals easier for LLM-powered search systems to …
llms.txt: The Standard for AI-Readable Sites
llms.txt is a proposed, non-binding convention for giving AI crawlers and agents a curated, human-written map of a site’s most imp…
Pay-Per-Crawl and the New Bot Web
AI web crawlers now fall into three operational buckets: training crawlers that feed model development, search/indexing crawlers t…
Ai Eng
RAG Best Practices for 2026
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in 2026 is no longer “embed PDFs and hope”: production systems use hybrid retrieval, rerankin…
Markets
Are Prediction Markets Good Forecasters?
Prediction markets are often good forecasting tools, but their accuracy is conditional: they tend to be strongest when markets are…
Real-World Asset Tokenization: State of Play
Real-world asset tokenization is moving from experimentation to production-scale financial infrastructure. In 2026, the strongest …