57% of internet traffic today is AI and web scraping bots — up from just 20% in 2021. For site owners, this has meant a frustrating binary: block bots using services like Cloudflare or Akamai and risk cutting off legitimate AI traffic, or allow them and get nothing in return.
x402 offers a third path. HTTP 402 — "Payment Required" — has existed in the spec since 1991 but was never practically implemented. x402 makes it real: a client hitting a payment-protected endpoint completes an on-chain transaction and attaches the payment signature (X-Payment-Signature) to the retry request before it can access the content.
x402 is an open, neutral standard for internet-native payments. It absolves the internet's original sin by natively making payments possible between clients and servers, creating win-win economies that empower agentic payments at scale.
It is part of the Linux Foundation, backed by Cloudflare, Coinbase, AWS, Google, Stripe, Visa, and others. This is not a crypto side project — it is foundational internet infrastructure.
Understanding the payment flow
