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Agent Commerce

x402

A payment protocol that revives the long-unused HTTP 402 Payment Required status code so an agent can pay for a resource inline over HTTP, settled in stablecoins. Established by Coinbase and Cloudflare and moved under Linux Foundation governance in April 2026. Volume is dominated by Base and Solana and settled almost entirely in USDC.

Why it matters

It is the machine-to-machine payment path with no card rail in it, which makes it the one that could support per-request pricing for agent access to content or APIs.

In practice

Not a DTC checkout mechanism today. Relevant if you intend to charge agents for access to something, rather than sell them physical goods.

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