Coinbase, among others, closed this gap in May 2025. Under x402, a server that wants a payment responds to a request with a 402 and a price. The client signs a stablecoin transfer, usually USDC, sends back the request with the attached payment and gets the data. The exchange takes seconds and requires no account, no card, and no prior relationship between the two parties.
This is why the AI industry cares. An autonomous agent cannot open a bank account, pass a credit check, or sign a SaaS contract, but can sign a transaction. Google has integrated x402 into its own agent payment protocol, and Cloudflare ships it in its agent toolkit.
The announcement did not include any usage figures, although x402 publishes them on its own homepage. The protocol has processed about 75 million transactions over the past 30 days, or about 29 per second, moving about $24 million between some 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers.
This equates to an average payment of around 32 cents, meaning the machine-to-machine thesis is working as expected, as no card network can profitably process such small fees.
Still, $24 million a month is only a fraction of what one of x402’s core members moves in a day.
