x402 Protocol Development

x402 is an open standard (Apache-2.0) that activates the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code for programmatic, on-chain payments. Originally created by Coinbase, now maintained by the x402 Foundation. No accounts, sessions, or API keys required - clients pay with signed crypto transactions directly over HTTP.

When to Use

• Building a paid API that accepts crypto micropayments
• Adding paywall to web content or endpoints
• Enabling AI agents to autonomously pay for resources
• Integrating MCP tools that require payment
• Building agent-to-agent (A2A) payment flows
• Working with EVM (Base, Ethereum, MegaETH, Monad, Polygon, Stable, Arbitrum), Solana, Stellar, or Aptos payment settlement
• Implementing usage-based billing with the upto scheme (LLM tokens, bandwidth, compute)
• Running an in-process facilitator (self-facilitation) without external facilitator dependency

Core Architecture

Three roles in every x402 payment: