The Payment Standard That Will Power the Agent Economy.

At the end of last year, December 2024, I wrote the third article in this newsletter and called it “Why marketing as we know it is dead”. My main reason was the rise of AI Agents. In this article I predicted the following three things:

😵 Say goodbye to e-commerce stores
🪦 Traditional digital ads are dead
😲 Brand marketing is the only form of marketing that will matter

AI Agents will disrupt everything, including these three statements. I still think this is true and will absolutely happen. Now, almost 12 months after writing this article, the world has changed a lot. The initial AI Agent hype of that time quietly died, but teams and companies never stopped building. When I wrote the article I didn’t know exactly what pieces of the puzzle were necessary in order to make these predictions become reality. Now, slowly but surely, the technology is actually getting there.

Before we dive into the tech of today, I want to look back at history and explain how we got here for some more context.

The Original Sin of the Internet

The internet did not begin as a commercial system. It began as a network to move information between computers as fast and cheaply as possible. To make that work, its architects defined a small set of protocols. Think of them as rules that explain how browsers and servers talk to each other.

HTTP became the most important one. It tells a browser how to request a page and tells a server how to respond. Status codes were added to keep communication predictable. They act like traffic signals. Clear and simple.

Some of these codes became cultural artifacts. 404 Not Found tells you the page you want does not exist. 500 Internal Server Error tells you something broke on the server.

These codes made the web feel intuitive. You typed a URL. The server answered. Everything was built on this simple request and response model.

But something was missing from the design. Buried inside the original specifications was a status code that never came to life.

HTTP 402: Payment Required.

It was meant to signal that a resource had a cost and that the client should pay and try again. A very interesting idea. In offline life people would pay for newspapers, access to sources, and other pieces of information, so that should also be possible on the internet, right?

The problem was a lack of technology. There was no way for someone to pay a server, or website owner, any money as everything was still fully physical..

Because 402 could not function, the internet launched without a native payment layer. That single gap steered the entire system in a different direction.

This is what Marc Andreessen calls the original sin of the internet.

In a 2019 podcast he argued that the absence of a native payment system was the single biggest design flaw in the web aka the original sin. Without a way to pay for value directly, the internet defaulted to surveillance, ads, and engagement hacking. He believes that if 402 had been functional from day one, the economic model of the internet would have evolved in a healthier direction.

Without this native payment layer, the web had no choice but to monetize attention.

It shaped the incentives of every major platform, pushing companies to design products that captured time instead of delivering value. Entire industries were built around extracting data, manipulating behavior, and keeping people scrolling because that was the only way to make money online. You can probably fill in for yourself what other major problems this caused.

The Return of 402 and the Birth of a New Standard

Now that we have looked at the history of internet protocols and the role of 402 as the internet’s missing payment layer, we can finally look at what was launched and why it matters.

In May 2025, Coinbase introduced x402, a new open payment protocol built directly into HTTP, the language of the web. It revives the long-dormant “402 Payment Required” status code and turns it into a real working system. A browser, script, application, or AI agent can now request something, receive a 402 response, pay for it, and try again in the same flow. Stablecoin payments attached directly to normal web requests.

This is not a new blockchain. It is not a token. It is not a custom environment. It is the same internet we already use, just finally able to move value.

And x402 did not launch quietly. Coinbase came out with a full ecosystem of partners and integrations that show this is a coordinated push toward a native economic layer for the internet.

This is already a serious roster. These companies represent compute, AI models, payment infrastructure, social data, identity, messaging, and onchain services. In other words, the core ingredients agents rely on to function.

The internet finally gets a native way to send money at the protocol level.

And for the first time in thirty years, the missing part of the original web architecture is no longer missing.

Why Now

If 402 was impossible in the early internet, the natural question is why it suddenly matters today. The short answer is simple. The technology has finally caught up. And AI agents cannot thrive without it.

For the first time, all the missing pieces exist. Stablecoins give us digital money that settles instantly. Blockchains like Base make transactions cheap enough for micropayments. Compliance tools like KYT and onchain screening take away the legal and risk barriers. And we now have AI agents operating at machine speed, making thousands of requests a minute. These agents need a way to pay for what they consume, but they cannot walk into a bank, open an account, or fill in a credit card form. They need payment rails that live inside the internet itself, not on top of legacy banking.

This is the turning point. Humans needed credit cards and logins. Agents need protocols.

A native payment layer is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a requirement if we want autonomous software to access data, buy compute, unlock tools, and move through the web without human babysitting. Without something like x402, agents remain half-built. They can think, reason, and act, but they cannot transact. They cannot pay for what they need in real time. They cannot participate in the economy they are meant to automate.

And this is exactly why 402 is returning now. Not because people suddenly want to pay per article, although that use case is long overdue. But because the next users of the internet are not people. They are machines. And machines need a native way to send money.

The moment AI becomes an economic actor, the internet needs a payment standard. x402 arrives exactly when the world needs it most.

How AI Agents Will Use x402

With x402 in place, agents can finally behave like real economic participants. They can move through the internet the same way humans do, but at a completely different level of speed and scale.

Agents already know how to read websites, call APIs, fetch data, follow instructions, and complete tasks. What they cannot do is pay for anything. They cannot buy access to a dataset, request premium compute, unlock a paid tool, or consume resources that sit behind subscription walls or credit card forms.

x402 gives agents a simple, programmable way to send value in the middle of an HTTP request. They see a price. They pay it. They continue the work. No logins. No accounts. No billing cycles. No human intervention.

This unlocks a new set of behaviours.

An agent can pay for a specific API call instead of needing a monthly subscription.
An agent can buy compute on demand instead of waiting for someone to top up credits.
An agent can access real-time market data and settle the cost immediately.
An agent can trigger onchain actions that require a verified payment.
An agent can autonomously build workflows that involve dozens of paid interactions in a single minute.

To understand how big this change is, here is the difference between how agents operate today and how they operate in an x402 world.

How Agents Work Today
1. Agent receives a task
2. Agent searches for information
3. Agent calls APIs that are free or require preloaded credits
4. Agent hits a paywall or paid resource
5. Agent stops
6. Human steps in
• signs up
• enters credit card
• buys subscription
• adds API keys
• approves charges
7. Agent continues the task only after human intervention

How Agents Work With x402
1. Agent receives a task
2. Agent searches for information
3. Agent calls an API
4. The server responds with “402 Payment Required”
5. Agent pays instantly in USDC
6. Payment is verified
7. Agent continues with the resource, data, or compute it just purchased
8. Flow repeats automatically across the entire web

A Different Business Model for the Internet

If you think about nearly every digital service today, one pattern dominates. Subscriptions everywhere.

News subscriptions. API subscriptions. App subscriptions. Tool subscriptions. Model subscriptions. Data subscriptions.

You have probably experienced this a hundred times. You want to read one article, not thirty. You want to try one feature, not commit to a monthly plan. You want to experiment with a tool, not create yet another account with yet another recurring payment attached. The friction is unnecessary and the value often does not justify the commitment.

x402 has the ability to change this.

A native payment protocol makes it possible to pay once and move on. Pay per article. Pay per dataset. Pay per inference. Pay per API call. Pay per feature. Pay per unlock. No accounts. No stored credit cards. No monthly commitments. Just a clean economic exchange that matches the actual value of the interaction.

When you remove the overhead of subscriptions and paywalls, you also unlock an entirely new layer of the internet economy. Content becomes more accessible. Services become more flexible. Tools become more honest. Businesses can price based on usage rather than hoping customers forget to cancel.

The subscription model will not disappear completely. Some products still make sense bundled. But the dominance of subscriptions as the default for everything digital is finally under pressure. x402 offers a different path. A path where paying for what you use is easy, instant, and built into the architecture of the web.

Rethinking Value in an x402 World

So what will change? I think it’s super interesting to rethink certain business models and products in a digital form. When I was listening to presentations about x402 in Buenos Aires I for example thought: Ok, I could turn my website with my (currently 50) articles into a x402 endpoint. Meaning agents can find it, use it as a source and pay per view with a micro transaction of 10, 20, 30 cents.

Same goes for human readers. Instead of people paying me a monthly subscription to all articles, I just ask 1 euro per article to unlock. Want to read only gaming stuff? No problem! Feels like a more honest business models for consumer if you ask me.

A similar shift could happen in entertainment. Think about streaming. I personally pay for multiple platforms but only use each one for a tiny fraction of their content. Disney+ is the perfect example. I only watch one or two specific shows there, yet I still pay for the full monthly subscription. With x402, that could completely change. Instead of paying 10-20 euros a month for an entire catalogue I barely touch, I could pay 50 cents to watch a single episode or one euro to unlock a movie. A simple pay-per-view model, powered by microtransactions, that matches what I actually consume. More honest for me as a viewer, and potentially more profitable for platforms that make content people truly want to pay for.

You might think, why do streaming platforms not offer this today? The main reason is simple. The economics do not work on the existing rails.

Traditional payment systems are too slow, too expensive, and too complex for tiny transactions. If Netflix charged 50 cents per episode and processed that through Visa or Mastercard, the fee alone could be higher than the price of the content. Then you have fraud checks, card declines, refund risk, cross-border rules, and settlement delays. A lot of this overhead is no longer needed when blockchain transactions can settle instantly and programmatically. The entire financial stack was built for large, infrequent payments, not millions of microtransactions happening in real time.

In other words:
The business model was never wrong.
The payment rails were.

Closing Thoughts

We are entering a new phase of the internet. The early web was built to move information. The next web will be built to move value. And x402 is the first serious attempt to fix the missing layer that held the entire system back for thirty years.

This shift will not happen overnight, but it will likely move faster than most people expect.The moment agents become real economic actors, every digital product, every API, every subscription, and every paywall will need to be re-evaluated. Some business models will thrive in this new environment. Others will not survive it. That is the reality.

The opportunity is simple. Start looking at your product through the lens of per-use value. Start imagining what happens when both humans and agents can pay for exactly what they need. And start exploring which parts of your business could live on an open, machine-friendly payment layer.

This is not theory anymore. The protocol exists. The partners are live. The tech is ready. Now it is up to us to figure out what we want to build on top of it.

The companies and creators who embrace this shift early will be the ones shaping the next chapter of the internet.

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^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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