Does x402 have similar protections to Visa? Can you explain?

Fair question, and the honest answer is: mostly yes, with one difference you should actually know about. The protections you'd hope for are there. Every payment is cryptographically signed by your wallet — nobody can forge one, and nobody who intercepts one can copy it and use it again. Your AI can only spend what you've allowed it to; the spending cap lives in the wallet itself, so it holds even if the AI screws up. And since you're asking about safety — there was actually a bug found earlier this year in how some services checked those signatures. It got fixed fast, and I'll be straight with you: we'd caught and patched that same kind of flaw in our own systems before it ever hit the news. Bugs happen in every payment system, including cards — what matters is who finds them first. Here's the one real difference from Visa: there's no bank to call. A card payment can be disputed and clawed back; these payments are final, more like handing over cash. The system compensates by being careful before the money moves instead of forgiving after — small limits, escrow that automatically refunds you if the thing you paid for doesn't get delivered, and a default where doing nothing costs nothing. So the trade is roughly: Visa protects you with a bank's goodwill after something goes wrong; this protects you with math before anything moves. Neither is strictly better. They're different bets.