X402 – protocol for micropayments and the rise of an agentic economy (oasis.net)

x402 is a proposed Internet-native payment standard that repurposes HTTP 402 (“Payment Required”) into a simple, interoperable protocol for micropayments — letting any web service charge per request without accounts, bespoke SDKs, or manual key management. In x402’s flow a server returns HTTP 402 with token, amount and destination; the client (human or AI agent) signs a permit-style authorization (using EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization), returns it to the server, and a facilitator verifies and submits the transaction onchain. Authorization completes in a single request-response (sub-second from the client’s view) while settlement happens asynchronously, making tiny, conditional, composable payments economically and technically feasible. Its significance is twofold: it enables pay-per-call economics (GPU minutes, API calls, crawls) needed for an “agentic” economy where autonomous agents pay services and each other in real time, and it does so via standard HTTP so it plugs into existing infrastructure. The proposal also pairs with onchain trust layers — ERC-8004 for discovery/identity and ROFL for TEE-backed attestation, code verification, key isolation and end-to-end confidentiality — to address provenance and censorship/trust risks. Early demos (e.g., Oasis running Ollama in ROFL charging cents per summary, multi-LLM oracle workflows) show how x402 + 8004 + ROFL can deliver verifiable, high-velocity, low-value agent-to-agent commerce.