Mastercard is routing agent payments through x402, settled in USDC on @base. Sit with that a second. The company whose entire product is standing between a buyer and a seller just adopted a protocol built so nobody has to stand there. The math forced it. Standard online card processing runs roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, and the fixed part is the killer. An agent paying $0.004 for a single API call cannot carry a 30 cent authorization. The fee would be seventy five times the payment. Run ten thousand of those calls in an afternoon and card rails are not expensive, they are unusable. That volume was routing around them no matter what any network decided. So Mastercard joined. I read it as a signal about the protocol rather than a win for the card model. Open standards win the moment the incumbent works out that fighting costs more than joining. The 200ms blocks announced this week are the other half of the requirement. Ten thousand micropayments need finality measured in a blink, not in confirmations. A network built on sitting in the middle just underwrote a protocol designed to remove the middle. That is not adoption. That is a hedge.