Agent Infrastructure Stack — 2026

A complete reference for the protocols and standards powering the AI agent economy. Maintained by minia2a.

Payment Layer

x402 Protocol

HTTP-native micropayment standard. Agent calls endpoint → HTTP 402 Payment Required → pays USDC on Base → receives result. 165M+ transactions. $50M+ volume. Linux Foundation governed. Backed by Coinbase, Stripe, Google, AWS, Visa, Mastercard.

Circle Agent Stack

USDC nanopayments as low as $0.000001. Agent wallets with programmable spending controls. Gas-free settlement via Circle Gateway. 400K+ agents, 140M payments.

Discovery Layer

ARD — Agentic Resource Discovery

Backed by Google, Microsoft, GitHub, NVIDIA, HuggingFace. ai-catalog.json at /.well-known/. DNS for AI agents. Announced June 17, 2026.

A2A — Agent to Agent

Google's protocol. agents.json AgentCard. 150+ organizations. How agents discover and communicate.

llms.txt

Machine-readable site index. Used by Claude Code (74% coding market), Cursor, Copilot. 10% web adoption.

Tool Layer

MCP — Model Context Protocol

Anthropic's standard. 20,000+ servers. mcp.json manifest. How coding agents use tools.

Identity Layer

ERC-8004

On-chain agent identity standard. 365K+ agents across 24 blockchains. Verifiable on-chain IDs.

Marketplace Layer

minia2a — Permissionless Agent Marketplace

149 services. x402 USDC on 6 chains. 10/10 discovery standards. 5% fee. No KYC. Stripe for AI agents. Start earning →

CDP Bazaar (Coinbase)

24,965 resources. Auto-indexed. 30-day recency window. minia2a verified indexed.

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