How does Pieverse seize the x402 opportunity to solve the BNB Chain payment bottleneck?

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

Original Title: What is the Story Behind Pieverse Riding the x402 Trend?

x402 has fueled the AI payment narrative, but the fire did not immediately spread to BNB Chain. The reason is that x402 is still in its early stages and only supports the ERC-3009 standard, while stablecoins on BNB Chain, including USDC, do not support this standard.

At this point, Pieverse, a payment protocol that has received continuous support from Binance and BNB Chain since being selected for MVB, stepped up. Not only did it solve the issue of BNB Chain not supporting x402 by launching pieUSD, a USDT wrapper token supporting the ERC-3009 standard, but it also upgraded x402, which only supported "payment" functionality, to x402b. Simply put, Pieverse generated verifiable receipts for payments on top of the original system, proving that payments were transactions between specific parties, rather than spontaneous AI actions.

A Protocol Related to "Time"

Pieverse has gone through two development stages. At its inception, it positioned itself as a "TimeFi" protocol, with its core Pieverse Timepot model aiming to help people or resources that require time to match find their targets more quickly through a series of platform mechanisms.

Pieverse's initial three products included Time Bid, Time Draw, and Time Task. Time Bid allowed users to bid for professionals' time, with Pieverse verifying the professionals' credentials via platforms like LinkedIn. Successful bidders could communicate directly with professionals on the platform via Zoom and other tools. Time Draw offered opportunities to interact privately with investors, traders, celebrities, etc., through a lottery system. Time Task provided a platform for anyone to post needs and offer services.

To put it simply, this was an intermediary platform, and the forced association with "time" seemed rather far-fetched. Currently, although these three products are still running, they appear to have lost all activity. Later, Pieverse launched VC Arena, which gained some attention by matching VCs with startup teams using the mechanisms of the aforementioned products, meeting some real needs.

Perhaps realizing the issue with its design approach, Pieverse shifted direction and launched a more financialized and engaging product: Time Challenge.

Essentially, Time Challenge turns daily commitments into structured, time-limited challenges with real financial risk. Whether it's a fitness goal, productivity target, or personal milestone, users can create or join challenges, lock in risk, and earn rewards based on the outcome.

There are two types of challenges. Prediction Challenges require participants to set a goal and stake a certain amount, while other users can bet on whether the challenger will achieve the goal within the time limit. The winner receives the staked money from both the challenger and those who predicted incorrectly. Commit Together is where a group of people with the same goal each stake the same amount, betting they can achieve the goal, and those who succeed take the money from those who don't.

It's often said that when personal interests become collective interests, individuals are motivated. This game, where everyone supervises each other and agrees to complete goals together, brings an inexplicable excitement when real money is involved, as reflected by the number of participants. Although many later activities were Web3 projects setting challenges for completing certain tasks, these scenarios were indeed much more interesting than the previous ones.

Pivoting to Payments at the Right Time

On the 9th of this month, Pieverse announced the launch of its payment tool, Pieverse Timestamping. Unlike most payment tools, Pieverse leveraged its previous experience with "timing" to automate the creation of invoices, stablecoin payments, and the generation of receipts compliant with local legal and tax requirements. Each transaction is paired with an on-chain timestamp, creating immutable and verifiable proof of payment.

At least for now, choosing to pivot to payments seems to have been the right decision. Less than two weeks after announcing the new product, x402 began dominating the headlines of major tech media, and Pieverse took the opportunity to add a verifiable component to x402 using the newly launched Timestamping and went live with a testnet, allowing BNB Chain, which previously had no tokens supporting ERC-3009, to overtake the competition.

The general process for transactions using x402b is as follows:

1. Client to resource server: Sends an HTTP request with an X-PAYMENT header, which includes payment + optional compliance metadata.

2. Resource server to Facilitator (infrastructure provider for "on-chain gasless payment + verification + settlement"): Verifies the signature and initiates settlement via /settle.

3. Facilitator to blockchain: Uses the user's signed authorization to call transferWithAuthorization on the pieUSD contract (no gas fee required).

4. Facilitator to BNB Greenfield (optional): Generates a compliance receipt and uploads it to Greenfield, making the proof tamper-proof and auditable.

5. Facilitator to resource server and then to client: Returns a standard x402 response, optionally including the Greenfield receipt URL.

In short, a single payment process includes user signature, service provider submission, and BNB Greenfield proof storage, pushing the development of x402 on BNB Chain a big step forward. It also successfully attracted market attention before the token issuance.

A Web3-Native Chinese Team with Deep Background

Currently, the only publicly disclosed co-founder of Pieverse is Colin Ho, who appeared in fundraising press releases, but no more information could be found. However, three people associated with Pieverse on LinkedIn already show a strong Web3 Native background.

Chief Marketing Officer David Chung previously worked on user experience and copywriting at Paxful, a US-based bitcoin peer-to-peer trading platform. H Fran, who claims to be a "core contributor," previously worked in investment at Hony Capital and later founded a startup that was acquired by Alibaba. Another co-founder, Junjia He (most likely the technical lead), was a software engineer at Uber and joined QuarkChain as an engineer in 2018, where he not only researched blockchain scaling via sharding but also led DeFi projects such as stablecoins, DEXs, and lending markets.

In April this year, Pieverse was selected for the ninth season of BNB Chain's Most Valuable Builder (MVB) program. Just last week, Pieverse officially announced the completion of a $7 million strategic funding round led by Animoca Brands and UOB Ventures, with participation from 10K Ventures, Signum Capital, Morningstar Ventures, Serafund, Undefined Labs, and Sonic Foundation, among others.

From being chosen by the BNB ecosystem, to pivoting to payments, to fundraising and helping BNB Chain support x402, Pieverse has kept a precise rhythm. If the market enthusiasm for AI payments and x402 continues for a while, Pieverse may once again "catch the wave" when it comes to token launch.