x402

According to CoinDesk, based on the report "Inside North America's $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates" released by Chainalysis, AI agents have completed over 138 million transactions through the x402 payment protocol incubated on the Base blockchain via Coinbase, using cryptocurrency to purchase data, computing power, and access to AI models.The report indicates that in geographically identifiable AI model inference payments, wallets associated with the United States account for 88.1%, while wallets associated with China only account for 0.1%. Eric Jardine, the research director at Chainalysis, stated that one possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models like DeepSeek and Qwen, thereby reducing the demand for pay-per-use inference services.Chinese-associated wallets exhibit different activity patterns, accounting for about 90% of geographically identifiable payments for security and code analysis services, with most of the flow directed towards the AI smart contract auditing platform AgentLisa.Jardine also cautioned that this gap should not be interpreted as open-source AI weakening the on-chain inference market in Asia. Currently, payment giants such as Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe have supported the x402 protocol, and Coinbase has also begun allowing enterprise clients to accept AI agent payments.

Hedera, a public blockchain, has launched Agent Accounts, described as programmable, non-custodial spending accounts that allow AI agents to autonomously transact within rules set by users and enforced on-chain. This includes payment APIs, data retrieval, invoice settlement, and purchasing on behalf of users, with private keys remaining in the user's wallet.Agent Accounts are funded from the user's existing Hedera wallet and are created separately for designated agents, rather than handing over the entire account to the agent. Users connect their wallets through a web application, designate agents, and configure total spending limits, daily caps, single transaction limits, and whitelists for merchants and payees. The rules are written into Hedera smart contracts and are not stored on company servers, making them unmodifiable by anyone other than the user. Funds do not leave the user's account before a purchase occurs; agents do not hold balances but send spending requests to the smart contract, which validates and executes them. Users can pause or revoke agent spending with a single click from their wallet.This feature is supported by Agentic Payment Services, including MCP server, REST API, and relayer. Hedera states that any agent capable of using MCP or REST can connect, with payments available in HBAR, USDC, or other Hedera tokens, and compatible with x402. Each strategy, transaction, and agent action is recorded on the Hedera Consensus Service. The timeline aims for a limited partner testnet launch in Q4 2026, a public testnet in Q1 2027, and a target mainnet launch in Q2 2027, depending on security audits and legal agreements.

According to CoinDesk, Brazil's state-controlled energy company Petrobras is testing the Cardano blockchain to track statements related to low-carbon fuels.The Cardano Foundation announced two research projects on Wednesday, one focusing on sustainable aviation fuel, which is a low-carbon aviation fuel alternative that can be used in existing aircraft and airports, and the other on Diesel R, which is diesel produced by Petrobras using renewable materials such as vegetable oils and animal fats.The aviation fuel project targets the book-and-claim model in green fuel sales: airlines can pay for the environmental benefits of sustainable fuel, even if the fuel itself is used elsewhere. This model requires recording the benefit attribution and claiming time to avoid double counting the same emissions reduction.The application records the source, recipient, and claiming time of each benefit through Cardano. In real scenarios, passengers can input their departure and destination airports to calculate the corresponding fuel benefits and receive a certificate linking their quota to the original fuel certificate. The diesel project records information on fuel production, transportation, and usage, compiling it into a complete fuel process history, which helps companies report Scope 3 emissions.Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, stated that Brazil has been one of the most stable adopters of Cardano, from government agencies like SERPRO to industrial sectors like SENAI, and Petrobras continues to value the on-chain traceability and transparency.He mentioned that with x402 landing on Cardano and Fireblocks increasing support for Cardano native tokens, institutional interest continues to grow.

Payment company Block announced the integration of the Bitcoin Lightning Network into the x402 payment standard. The x402 protocol can complete verification and unlock data through Lightning Network invoices and payment preimages after the server returns an HTTP 402 payment request.Steve Lee, head of Block's open-source Bitcoin development department Spiral, stated that this integration is aimed at instant, low-cost micropayment scenarios. Block has not yet disclosed the timeline for integrating this standard into Cash App, Square, or Bitkey, and the related Python implementation still needs to be tested through real nodes.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform that Block has joined the x402 Foundation and is providing Bitcoin Lightning Network support for the AI agent-oriented open payment standard x402.x402 embeds payments directly into HTTP, allowing AI agents to autonomously pay for goods, services, and other agent tool fees. Block stated that the Lightning Network is suitable for the billions of instant, low-cost micropayments expected to be generated by the agent economy.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform that the x402 Foundation has incorporated the Lightning Network payment specifications into its open internet payment standards. x402 was originally developed by Coinbase, aiming to allow AI agents and applications to automatically complete payments and continue executing tasks upon receiving a "402 Payment Required" response, without the need to create accounts, input credit card information, or manage API subscriptions.The protocol is now governed by the Linux Foundation, with participation from companies such as Cloudflare, Google, AWS, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and American Express. With the incorporation of the Lightning Network, AI agents can utilize the Satoshi payment API calls, data, computing power, MCP tools, and other digital resources, and cryptographically prove payments through Lightning Network pre-images.

Cardano has joined the official x402 software development kit, allowing developers to enable applications or AI agents to use ADA or Cardano network tokens to pay for online services. x402 transforms the basic idle "402 Payment Required" response in web pages into a checkout process built into internet requests: the service provider returns the price and payment instructions, the agent signs the payment, and after transaction verification, the required data or computing power can be obtained.This means that AI agents can purchase individual datasets on demand when preparing reports, without the need for manual account registration, entering credit card information, or subscribing to monthly fees. x402 was created by Coinbase in 2025 and subsequently contributed to an organization under the Linux Foundation, with members including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and Amazon Web Services. Solana, XRP Ledger, and several Ethereum-compatible networks have previously supported this standard.Engineers from the Cardano Foundation have built client and server software for payment requests based on the specifications passed in June, as well as a facilitator responsible for verifying and submitting transactions. The first version supports TypeScript, with Python support planned for later release. Facilitator documentation shows that it has completed a real transaction on the Cardano pre-production network, but it has not yet run on the mainnet, nor has it demonstrated scenarios where agents use ADA to pay for commercial services on a large scale.

Circle's public chain Arc has officially announced that it has launched proxy payments.Its Facilitator Service provides a hosted access path for x402 developers, allowing the acceptance of USDC and supporting on-chain settlements on Arc, Base, and Polygon; this path does not require a Relayer key or a separate Gas fee wallet.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire posted on the X platform that the Circle x402 Facilitator service has launched on Arc, which supports the settlement of USDC on Arc, Base, and Polygon PoS through EIP-3009.In addition, with the launch of Arc, the market demand for cirBTC is increasing. Currently, Circle Mint customers can directly mint and redeem cirBTC natively within the app, with each cirBTC backed 1:1 by 1 native BTC and redeemable for native BTC at a 1:1 ratio.

According to the official announcement, Binance Pay has announced the expansion of its enterprise payment capabilities, launching a set of on-chain solutions aimed at wallets, trading platforms, dApps, payment service providers, merchants, and digital platforms, including On-ramp as a Service, Pay On-chain, and AgentPay based on x402.This service allows enterprises to leverage Binance's infrastructure to provide users with features such as cryptocurrency asset purchases, on-chain fund transfers, and programmatic payments.

A report released by the blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs shows that most of the transaction volume on the x402 payment protocol launched by Coinbase does not come from AI agents. The report analyzed 198.9 million settlements processed by known x402 facilitators on Base, Solana, and Polygon since May 2025, involving an amount of approximately $52.7 million.After excluding self-payments and other anomalous fund flows, about $25.62 million was identified as potential commercial transactions, of which only 0.6% to 7.5% by amount came from AI agents. TRM pointed out that ordinary scripts, scheduled tasks, and self-trading can also generate the same on-chain records, so the total transaction volume of the protocol is insufficient to measure agent commerce; their model identifies addresses that repeatedly pay for the same service as scripts, which may underestimate the actual scale of single-use agents. During the reporting period, USDC accounted for 99.6% of the settlement value, approximately $52.47 million.Meanwhile, Binance's Agent OS launched in August has integrated the x402 payment layer, Coinbase's Base supports agents and payment startups through a $1 million accelerator, and Amazon also launched AgentCore Payments in May in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe. TRM recommends improving the on-chain agent registration mechanism, establishing a verifiable counterparty reputation system for agents, and building a monitoring framework suitable for small, high-frequency payments, stating that "agent commerce requires agent compliance."

Research institution Shoal Research released a report stating that bots account for about 60% of HTML content HTTP requests on the Cloudflare network, while humans account for 38.2%. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince previously predicted that bot traffic would surpass human traffic by 2027, and later announced that the growth of agent traffic has already led to bots exceeding human traffic.The report states that AI applications keep users in chat interfaces and summarize content, rather than redirecting them back to the original site. AI crawlers have a much higher crawl-to-return ratio than Googlebot, with ClaudeBot averaging about 4,200 pages crawled per return visit over the past year. Pew research shows that AI summaries have reduced click-through rates from 15% to 8%.The robots.txt and content exchange traffic model are difficult to maintain. Litigation and private authorization are stopgap measures. Pay-per-request is divided into a closed market with keys and open protocols using HTTP 402 and stablecoins like x402 and MPP. Most websites still offer free access or block it.

Coinbase stated on the X platform that the financial layer surrounding AI agents is referred to as agent finance, or AiFi, which encompasses agent trading and agent commerce. AI agents can research information, make decisions, and execute operations on behalf of individuals and businesses, and they need to perform basic financial activities such as payments, receipts, value storage, and fund transfers. Coinbase claims that it is building tools for AI agents to continuously execute financial operations within predefined goals, permissions, limitations, and security boundaries.Coinbase indicated that Coinbase Advisor, Coinbase for Agents, x402, and Coinbase Business have formed the AiFi infrastructure. Coinbase Advisor is an SEC-registered investment advisor integrated into the app for Coinbase One users, providing portfolio analysis and guidance through a chat interface; Coinbase for Agents connects tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor to Coinbase accounts via MCP, allowing users to set operational conditions and security boundaries for agents, as well as create independent sandbox accounts for agent use.Coinbase stated that x402 is an open payment standard initiated by Coinbase and currently managed by an independent foundation, which supports AI agents in paying fees to other agents, applications, and services. As of now, x402 has processed over 205 million transactions, with a transaction volume of $53 million, covering 200,000 sellers, with Coinbase facilitating 67% of the activities. Single payments can be used for API calls, datasets, research materials, or computing resources.Coinbase indicated that Coinbase Business supports enterprises in natively receiving AI agent payments in USDC, and Coinbiz can help merchants sell services and content to software without relying on credit card credentials, manual invoicing, or payment processes designed with human customers in mind. Eligible businesses can earn a floating reward of 3.35% from idle USDC balances. USDC currently accounts for 99% of on-chain agent commerce transactions, while x402 represents 97% of agent finance protocol usage, with related activities operating on Base.

AI Economic Settlement Agreement AEON disclosed that since its launch of the x402 AI payment architecture on the BNB Chain, it has processed over 1.4 million x402 transactions on the BNB Chain, with a total settlement amount exceeding 14.73 million USD. This agreement mainly supports AI Agents in autonomously completing instant verification and settlement of on-chain assets. Relevant transaction data is currently open for real-time tracking on BNB x402scan (https://bnbscan.ai/).

Coinbase announced the construction of a complete financial and payment infrastructure for AI Agents. The official statement claims that AI Agents can conduct research, decision-making, and trading on its platform, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, and derivatives, through "Coinbase for Agents," and can access Coinbase Advisor for personalized investment advice and tax-loss harvesting services.On the payment layer, Coinbase launched the open standard x402, enabling agent-to-agent machine payments without human involvement. Related transactions are primarily settled on the Base chain, while Coinbase Business supports businesses in receiving payments from AI Agents in USDC and provides discovery and marketplace access for x402 payable services on Agentic.Market.

Visa and the on-chain data analysis platform Artemis previously jointly released the report "Agentic Payments from the Ground Up," which quantifies the trends of AI agent payments based on real-time on-chain data. The report points out that intelligent commerce should be divided into macro transactions (AI agents completing bookings, subscriptions, etc., adapting to existing card systems) and micro payments (high-frequency small payments between machines, with individual transactions far below $1, which traditional payment structures struggle to support).The report focuses on two "machine-native payment" protocols: x402 (developed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, etc., launching in May 2025) with an adjusted transaction volume of approximately $15 million and 109.6 million transactions as of April 21, 2026, with 422,000 buyers and about 5,300 sellers, primarily concentrated on Base, Solana, and Polygon, settled in USDC; MPP (developed by Stripe and Tempo, with Visa's participation, launching in mid-March 2026) had a transaction volume of approximately $25,000 and 115,000 transactions within 33 days of launch, supporting both on-chain crypto payments and fiat settlements.The report believes that the leap in AI capabilities (with the release of Claude 4.5 and GPT Codex 5.2 in mid-2025) has created a demand for programmatic payments, combined with the decreasing costs of blockchain settlements, making micro payments in the range of 1 cent to 1 dollar economically viable for the first time. Currently, the boundaries between crypto-native protocols and card payment camps are gradually blurring, but agent payments still face trust challenges such as erroneous purchases, adversarial attacks, and liability attribution.

The Linux Foundation, in collaboration with Visa, Mastercard, and 40 other institutions, has launched the x402 payment standard. In the past 30 days, approximately 75 million stablecoin transactions have been processed, totaling 24 million USD.

According to The Block, the Linux Foundation has officially established the x402 Foundation, governed by a structure of 40 member companies, with Coinbase having completed its contribution to the protocol. Founding members include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, as well as Circle, MoonPay, the Solana Foundation, and the Stellar Foundation.The protocol allows servers to respond to requests with a 402 response and pricing, while clients sign stablecoin transfers (usually USDC) and resend requests for data, without the need for accounts, credit cards, or prior relationships between the parties, making it inherently adaptable for AI agent applications. Previously in April, it was reported that the neutral internet payment protocol x402, incubated by Coinbase, would migrate under the Linux Foundation and operate in the form of an independent foundation called the "x402 Foundation."

The Coinbase developer platform has released an update on the progress of the payment ecosystem development. With the official launch of Coinbase for Agents, users can now create independent accounts for AI Agents, executing automated operations such as transactions and asset management under set permissions and risk control rules. The new Coinbase CLI and MCP have simplified the login process and have been demonstrated for identity and operation integration via Claude. The developer wallet is now available through the Swift SDK, supporting the integration of self-hosted wallet functionality in iOS native applications.In the coming weeks, the x402 protocol will support users within Coinbase for Agents to make direct payments using their USDC balance, allowing Agents to not only operate accounts but also complete real payments directly through the stablecoins held by users. Additionally, Coinbase will release a system update on June 16 to further enhance payment and Agent-related capabilities.

According to CoinDesk, Ripple is attempting to introduce XRP along with its stablecoin Ripple USD into the AI agent payment market, aiming to penetrate the on-chain micropayment system currently dominated by the USD stablecoin USD Coin. It has released the "XRPL AI Starter Kit," providing developers with a toolkit to build AI Agent payment capabilities, enabling agents to complete payments, check balances, and perform wallet operations on the XRP Ledger, and supporting automated payment processes based on the x402 protocol.However, Ripple has not yet disclosed any scaled landing customers or real production-level AI Agent payment transaction data; the solution is still in the early exploratory stage of infrastructure and developer ecosystem.