W2 litepapers: x402 payments and intents

Leo Belyaev of X1 Labs has published two design papers for W2, a smart wallet that signs with a passkey, the fingerprint or face unlock already on your phone or laptop, instead of a seed phrase. One covers paying for web requests with x402, the other paying through intents.

What W2 is

A smart wallet is a wallet whose rules are set by an on-chain program instead of a single private key. With passkeys, the key lives in the device's secure hardware. There is nothing to write down and nothing to lose on paper, and the program can enforce rules such as spending limits.

W2 and x402

x402 is an open standard for paying for something on the web with a crypto payment inside the HTTP request: a server answers "402 Payment Required" with a price, the client pays and retries. The design lets one passkey approval cover a single payment, or a capped budget that an AI agent can spend without asking each time.

W2 and intents

With an intent you sign the result you want, not the steps to get there, for example "deliver 5 USDC to this merchant, paid from my XNT, at no worse than market minus 1%". Solvers compete to fill it and an on-chain program checks the result before money moves.

Why it could be good for X1

Seed phrases are the biggest reason people give up on crypto. A passkey wallet with spending rules makes X1 usable for ordinary payments and safe for AI agents, which need to pay small amounts without a person approving each one. Both are areas where chains are competing hard right now.

What to watch

These are designs. Nothing in them is live on mainnet, and the papers target testnets first.

Sources

• x402 specification: https://www.x402.org
• Leo Belyaev's W2 papers (X1 Labs)