The Internet Was Built for Humans.
We're Fixing That.
HTTP has had a payment status code since 1991. 35 years later, we decided to use it.
30 million businesses.
Zero agent customers.
The web works for humans. You click, you pay, you get what you ordered. The UX is seamless. The plumbing is not your problem.
Agents don't click. They call APIs. And when they need to pay for something — a data feed, a subscription, a physical product — there's no protocol for it. Every developer rolls their own solution. Most don't bother.
Here's the irony: HTTP has included status code 402 Payment Required since RFC 1945 in 1996. It was reserved for future payment systems that never came. The internet grew from nothing to $6 trillion in e-commerce — and nobody implemented the payment primitive that was always part of the spec.
So agents hit endpoints and get 401 Unauthorized. Or 403 Forbidden. Or just a hard block. They can't buy. Businesses can't sell to them. The agent economy is a market that doesn't exist yet — not because of demand, but because the infrastructure was never built.
Payment is the protocol.
The protocol is HTTP.
HTTP 402 was always the answer. It was waiting.
An agent calls your endpoint. You return 402 Payment Required with a price and a USDC wallet address. The agent pays. The agent retries. Your server verifies the payment and responds. Done.
No API keys. No OAuth flows. No subscriptions to manage. No chargebacks. The payment is the authentication.
→ Agent: GET /api/analyze
← Server: 402 Payment Required
X-Payment-Amount: 0.050000
X-Payment-Destination: 0xYour...Wallet
→ Agent: GET /api/analyze
X-Payment: <signed-receipt>
← Server: 200 OK { "result": "..." }This is not a new protocol. It's the original one. We just finished building it.
Four things we hold to be true.
Open infrastructure over walled gardens.
The agent economy should run on open protocols, not proprietary APIs. x402 is open. SKILL.md is open. The SDKs are MIT-licensed. Nobody should need our permission to build on this.
Five minutes, not five weeks.
If accepting agent payments requires months of engineering, nobody does it. The integration should be a npm install, not an architecture review. Businesses build products — not payment infrastructure.
Zero chargebacks is the right default.
The payments industry loses $125 billion a year to chargeback fraud. That's not a feature of commerce — it's a tax on trust. USDC transactions are irreversible by design. Refunds are explicit, merchant-controlled, and escrow-protected. You keep what you earn.
Microtransactions only work when the cost of a transaction is micro.
At $0.001 per transaction on Base L2, a $0.05 API call is viable business. At Stripe's $0.25 minimum per transaction, it isn't. The economics of agent commerce require a payment rail built for high-frequency, low-value transactions. That rail exists now.
We build for the people who build.
The API developer with 10,000 daily requests they can't monetize.
You built something useful. Agents are using it. You're paying for the infrastructure and getting nothing back. You don't want to build a billing system — you want to set a price and get paid.
The SaaS founder whose product is invisible to AI agents.
Your product has a login page. Agents can't log in. They can't subscribe, they can't renew, they can't use anything behind your auth wall. We give agents a way to subscribe with USDC and receive ticket-based access immediately.
The AI agent builder who needs one protocol for everything.
Your agent needs weather data, translation, image analysis, and e-commerce integrations. Every one of those is a different API, a different key, a different payment method. With @402md/client, there's one SDK, one USDC wallet, one protocol. Search, pay, call.
The full commerce stack.
Not just the payment button.
402.md is not a payment gateway. It's the commerce infrastructure layer that should have existed when agents became real.
Every transaction verified against Base L2. No manual reconciliation. No fraud.
API calls settle instantly. Physical products hold for 72 hours. Services for 48. SaaS for 24.
USDC hits your wallet daily, weekly, or monthly. You keep 97%. We take 3%.
Crypto is irreversible. There's no mechanism for a chargeback. Refunds are explicit and merchant-initiated.
Register a skill, get a SKILL.md file, auto-register in Coinbase Bazaar. 94,000+ agents find your skill.
APIs. SaaS. Physical products. Content. Services. One npm install @402md/gateway.
We don't extract rent.
We build infrastructure.
Platforms win by locking you in. We win by being genuinely useful.
The x402 protocol is open at x402.org. If we disappear tomorrow, the protocol keeps working. The SKILL.md format is documented and open. Any indexer can read it. Any agent can use it. The @402md/gateway, @402md/client, and @402md/mcp packages are MIT-licensed. Fork them. Modify them. Ship them.
We make money on transactions — 3% of what you earn. Our interests are aligned with yours. When you earn more, we earn more.
We're building the plumbing — the layer that connects agent buyers to human sellers over an open protocol that's been waiting 35 years to be used.
The agent economy is coming. It will need infrastructure. That infrastructure should be open, cheap, and honest.
That's what we're building.
Start earning from agents today.
Register a skill in 5 minutes. No credit card, no approval process.