x402 Wake Up the 30-Year Sleeping Protocol! Volume Soars 700%, AI Payment Revolution Arrives

The HTTP status code 402 “Payment Required”, reserved in 1997, has been dormant for nearly 30 years and was awakened by the x402 protocol in May 2025, receiving support from Google and Visa. As of October 2025, data from Dune Analytics shows that x402 on-chain volume surged by 701.7%.

HTTP 402 Sleeping for 30 Years, Blockchain Awakens the Payment Layer

(Source: Ledger Insights)

In 1997, the HTTP standard left a blank interface in the early blueprint of the internet—status code 402, “Payment Required.” It was envisioned as the gateway for native internet payments, but due to the lack of technology and the era's conditions, it has remained dormant for nearly thirty years. In 2025, the largest compliant cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, along with Cloudflare, Google, and Visa, will reignite it—x402, which is not just a protocol; it could be the monetary syntax of the AI agent economy, a completion of the internet's “payment layer” that has been absent for thirty years.

The internet has a fundamental flaw: it lacks a native payment layer. When we look back at the development of the internet, we find that it has achieved great success in information transmission—HTTP protocol has made data exchange seamless and efficient on a global scale. However, when it comes to value exchange, the internet has always relied on external, centralized payment systems.

The historical dilemmas of online payments are primarily reflected in two aspects. The traditional payment system faces the problem of the impossibility of micropayments, where the fixed fee of $0.30 per transaction plus about 3% transaction fee for credit cards makes any transaction below $1 economically unviable. At the same time, the fragmentation of user experience also hinders the large-scale application of payments, as traditional online payments require users to register accounts, set up API keys, and bind payment information, making the process cumbersome and posing security risks.

HTTP status code 402 was originally a reserved interface from the early days of the internet, symbolizing “future payments.” However, during that time, no technology existed to make it truly operational. Thus, this code lay dormant for 27 years. It wasn't until the maturity of blockchain technology, especially with Layer 2 networks like Base reducing transaction costs to mere fractions of a cent, and compliant stablecoins like USDC providing a reliable unit of account, that payments at the $0.01 level became economically feasible.

x402 protocol restart The three technical prerequisites of HTTP 402:

L2 Cost Revolution: Base chain reduces transaction costs to 0.0001 USD, making micro-payment economy viable.

Stablecoin Maturity: USDC provides a compliant and stable unit of account.

AI Agent Demand: Machine-to-machine payments require an automated interface with no human intervention.

The largest compliant cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Visa, and Google form an alliance

In 2025, the x402 protocol rapidly grew from a niche developer project to the foundational payment layer of the AI agent economy. According to on-chain data statistics from Dune Analytics, as of October 2025, the on-chain volume of the x402 protocol surged by 701.7%, with the transaction amount skyrocketing by 8218.5%, and the daily transaction amount approaching $140,000.

Core supporters and key time nodes outline the development trajectory of the x402 protocol. In May 2025, the largest compliant cryptocurrency exchange in the United States officially released the x402 protocol, launched in collaboration with partners such as AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and NEAR; on September 15, Google announced the integration of x402 into its Agent Payments Protocol, marking the formal endorsement by the internet giant; on September 23, the largest compliant cryptocurrency exchange in the United States and Cloudflare jointly initiated the x402 Foundation to ensure the open governance and neutrality of the protocol; on October 13-14, global payment giant Visa announced support for the x402 standard through its Trusted Agent Protocol.

The formation of this cross-industry alliance clearly indicates that all parties are committed to making x402 a universal industry standard rather than a proprietary tool of any one company. While maintaining competition, the parties have reached a consensus at the protocol level, laying the foundation for the entire AI agent economy. From on-chain data, the x402 protocol has processed over 1 million transactions and has more than 68,000 independent buyers.

Data from the past 30 days shows that the number of transactions on the x402 protocol has increased by 35,000%, exceeding 1 million; the number of buyers has increased by 244,000%, surpassing 68,000 people. The latest data for the past 24 hours indicates that the number of transactions reached 424.85 thousand, the transaction volume amounted to 483.87 thousand USD, and the number of unique buyers reached 25.61 thousand. Behind these numbers is the fact that people have tested the payment channel of HTTP 402 with real money for the first time.

Gartner predicts a $30 trillion market for AI agents in the era of autonomous payments

With the rapid development of AI technology, AI agents are becoming a new focus in the tech field. However, when OpenAI launched the o1 model, Claude supported computer operations, and Google released AI 2.0, the industry faced a common problem: how to enable AI agents to autonomously complete payments? The x402 protocol precisely addresses this pain point.

According to the Gartner 2024 AI agent market report, it is forecasted that by 2030, the volume dominated by AI agents will reach 30 trillion dollars. However, the existing payment systems require a lot of manual setup and maintenance, making it impossible for AI to operate independently. Nowadays, for AI agents to access paid APIs, it is necessary to manually register on various platforms, bind credit cards, and maintain API keys—this entire process relies heavily on human intervention, which is contrary to the concept of autonomy for AI agents.

The core value brought by the x402 protocol for AI agents is reflected in three aspects. It “kills the API key,” allowing payments to be completed directly through HTTP requests, enabling AI agents to access paid APIs without human intervention; it resolves the dependence on manual and third-party payment platforms; and it cuts off the high commissions of credit cards and third-party payment intermediaries. This allows AI agents to truly realize autonomous economic behavior.

The scenarios for machine-to-machine payments are rapidly expanding. In terms of API calls, trading bots pay $0.02 for real-time market data per request; in terms of computing resources, AI models pay $0.50 for GPU usage per minute for model training; in data retrieval scenarios, research AI pays $0.25 to access a paid research article. These seemingly small transactions form a huge market when scaled up.

Surrounding the x402 protocol, a vibrant ecosystem has quickly formed. Questflow acts as a multi-AI agent workflow layer, allowing multiple AI agents to autonomously coordinate and execute tasks; AuroraCloud is the AI agent infrastructure for crypto-native applications; PayAI provides multi-chain x402 payment service support, including Solana. The x402 Bazaar creates standardized, machine-readable service indexes, allowing agents to dynamically query, discover, and automatically invoke services without any human intervention.