There’s a lot of excitement around Agentic Commerce/Payments emerging over the past few weeks. McKinsey released a report projecting that agentic commerce could drive up to $5 trillion in global sales by 2030. Stripe, OpenAI, Coinbase, Google, PayPal and Cloudflare have all announced major projects and partnerships in the space. At the same time, there's still confusion and justified skepticism around what's working in agentic commerce today, what we can expect to see in the near term, and functionality that won't be usable until far in the future.

Old Is New Again

x402, led by Coinbase and launched in May 2025, treats payments as a native part of the web by reviving the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. The way it works is somewhat simple: When an agent makes a request, the server can respond with a 402 and a machine-readable "offer" (price, currency, terms) that the agent theoretically responds to before continuing. The idea is that rather than having to top-up an account and manage access and billing for every API an agent needs to access, the agent can complete each request as a “microtransaction” with its own crypto wallet.

Source: x402: An open standard for internet-native payments

This process has the potential to simplify APIs that implement usage-based billing in favor of a lower-overhead, “pay-per-use” model. In the future this could enable pay-per-use access to news articles, scientific publications, and compute resources. Today, x402 is up and running with Cloudflare's somewhat controversial "pay-per-crawl" service, but the majority of the volume comes from its use as a payment mechanism for DeFi and NFT-related services. This is somewhat unsurprising given Coinbase’s focus on crypto, but still quite a bit different from the narrative they portray as “displacing the API key” for more mainstream use cases.

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