Webinar Recap: Giving AI agents a native way to pay with x402

Solana Foundation and Coinbase recently hosted a webinar on x402, a protocol designed to give AI agents a native payment layer for the web. The system allows agents to discover, evaluate, and pay for resources such as APIs or articles without human intervention, using stablecoins like USDC on Solana. This addresses a longstanding gap where the internet relies on ads, subscriptions, or manual credit card entries for access. The protocol leverages Solana’s high-speed, low-cost infrastructure, which has processed $10 trillion in transfers and hosts over $15 billion in circulating stablecoins.

x402 repurposes the unused HTTP 402 status code as a per-request payment mechanism, enabling agents to receive real-time pricing, assess affordability, and settle payments instantly. Transactions are settled in stablecoins, eliminating the need for humans to provision accounts or manage API keys. The protocol has already processed over 180 million transactions since its launch a year ago, with a volume exceeding $50 billion and support for roughly 150,000 merchant endpoints. Most transactions are under 50 cents, a scale traditional card networks do not support.

The protocol addresses three core challenges for AI agents operating across paid resources: integrating payment and access into a single runtime, enabling real-time decision-making, and reducing friction in agentic workflows. x402 is an open standard hosted by the Linux Foundation, with contributions from companies like Cloudflare, Stripe, and AWS, where it is integrated into Agent Core Payments. AI-native services such as Browserbase and Exa also reference the standard in their documentation.

Live demos during the webinar showcased how x402 reduces the time required to provision API access from 30 minutes to under a second by embedding payments directly into agent workflows. Developers can access protocol documentation at x402.org, while teams interested in tools like pay.sh and AWOL may contact the Solana Foundation. Solana’s infrastructure, trusted by entities like Visa and PayPal, processes more transactions than all other blockchains combined, with sub-penny fees and 395ms block confirmations.