Yeah I hate Oath.

I really wish APIs were as just having a free tier that you can just use, and if you want more, just POST $10 worth of Solana to some endpoint and the API gives your IP 10000 more requests. No accounts, no keys, just simple.

I'm not a cryptocurrency fanatic but making APIs easier to access is one really good use case for it. It makes paying for an API as easy as paying for a lemonade at a street stand with cash. No accounts, no billing addresses, no subscriptions, just POST over a nickel along with your API request and get a response, and API owner gets paid.

No keys or accounts, but you need to maintain a (volatile as they all are) cryptocurrency wallet? It would be nice if ye olde banks and fintech actually came up with some standard for a sort of digital cashier's check though.

IP-based requests seems very restrictive. I'd rather post some sort of payment to an endpoint then get some arbitrary secret back that I could use/save/distribute. Maybe you could choose the mode you wanted though, so if you were confident your IP would remain stable and not be shared with anyone else, you could choose that mode.

The accounts are usually an anti-abuse feature; few people want to provide services to faceless bad actors on the internet.

Having to force all your requests through a single IP and maintain some weird crypto wallet is easier than grabbing an OAuth library?