JP_Stripes Connect 2026

I attended JP_Stripes Connect 2026 at Information Science College in Yokohama on Saturday, August 1. The theme was “Find out how to monetize in the AI era.” The event had two tracks: main and tech. I’m basically a tech-side guy, but this time I stayed on the main track throughout the event.

I couldn’t arrive at the venue in time for the beginning of the keynote session by Daniel Heffernan, but I was still able to learn how frequently prices are changing these days. One well-known online service changed its pricing ten times within a single year. The session explained that pricing is a product（価格はプロダクトである）and encouraged companies to keep iterating on it based on what they learn.

Another interesting topic was x402, introduced in a session by Daniel and Yusuke Wada (Yusukebe). x402 is a protocol that makes use of the HTTP 402 response to support micropayments by agents or humans over the internet. Have you ever thought about using the 402 response for anything other than a joke? I hadn’t. You can actually try it and see how it works here: Cloudflare x402 Playground.

Yu Kitazume walked us through the history of credit cards, some of the weaknesses in their design, and the concept of network tokens. I hadn’t heard of agentic tokens before. They seem to be a kind of network token for agents, with restrictions such as spending caps, expiration dates, and permitted merchants. I still don’t have a clear picture of exactly how they work, so I’d like to go down that rabbit hole.

These were only a few of the interesting things I learned at the event; there was far too much to cover in a single post. The event lasted about five hours, but it felt like only a couple of hours. Many thanks to the organizers and to Hidetaka Okamoto for doing a great job as MC.