Google Agentic Payments Protocol and X402: Agents Can Now Pay Each Other (www.coinbase.com)

Google announced an extension to its Agent2Agent (A2A) framework: the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) with x402, a stablecoin facilitator that lets AI agents handle real economic transactions with each other. Built as an AP2 extension, x402 enables agents to autonomously pay and monetize services using stablecoins (demoed with USDC), supporting micropayments, pay-per-use fees and instant blockchain-backed settlement. Google and Coinbase showcased a proof‑of‑concept with Lowe’s Innovation Lab where an agent discovers, recommends local SKUs, assembles a cart, and completes checkout and fulfillment using x402; some demo steps were simulated. Why it matters: adding payments to cross-platform agent interactions moves agents from information exchange to economic actors, unlocking new workflows and micro-economies—research agents that pay archival crawlers per document, code-review agents charging cents per bug, or support agents instantly hiring translation services. Technical implications include frictionless, token-based settlement (no card data), lower fraud risk, instant finality, and automated discovery via an x402 “bazaar” so agents can integrate services without developer upgrades. For developers and enterprises this opens low-latency monetization models and autonomous workflows; Google says x402 in AP2 is available for experimentation today.