Can anyone tell me why this is any better than just logging in? This seems like its solving a problem that doesnt exist.
Having created a micropayment network, you quickly discover that infrastructure does not exist where you want to use it. Web APIs are kind of the obvious use case, but because there was no micropayment system they trended to an account and batch payment method by necessity.
This aims to fill that infrastructure gap. Of course, there's a huge chicken-and-egg bootstrap problem, but you have to start somewhere!
E.g. Prior to L402, services needed to conglomerate into siloed ecosystems because there's the need for statefull authentication (Backend: Is this user who is requesting inferences allowed to run this query? How much credit account balance do they have remaining? You third party app have to integrate with me if you want to my users to be able to make calls to your module)
Post L402: A stateless service can compose a list of service calls (which all operate independently -- without the lack of competition, costs of integration, and politics of service<>module app ecosystem -- Read OpenAI etc) to potentially 100s of services to produce the broad number of API results needed fulfill the users request. Detailed explanation and examples are provided by the company who published the FOSS L402 spec here: https://youtu.be/6u1G8QIDuNU?t=206