x402
A parking meter on every web page. Drop in a few cents and the gate opens; no account needed.
Reality check
In production, but small. Cumulative counts range from about 100 million to more than 200 million transactions, but CoinDesk (March 11, 2026) found about $28,000 a day of real payments, averaging about 20 cents, with roughly half judged artificial. Cloudflare's "billion 402 responses a day" counts payment requests, not payments. Count dollars, not transactions.
How it works
The internet never had a built-in way to charge tiny amounts, so content is either free with ads or behind subscriptions. With x402, a server answers "402: pay $0.01 to this address," the client attaches a signed stablecoin payment (usually USDC), and a "facilitator" settles it on a blockchain in seconds, for fees of a fraction of a cent that card networks can't match.
Picture an agent paying a weather API a cent per lookup, or a crawler paying a publisher per page instead of being blocked.
Who's behind it
Coinbase created it, and version 2 shipped on December 11, 2025. The Linux Foundation announced an x402 Foundation on April 2, 2026 and made it operational on July 14 with 40 members; the 17 premier members include AWS, Google, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Shopify, Cloudflare, Coinbase and Circle, the broadest coalition of any agent-payment standard.