355 articles on the AI agent economy, x402 protocol, M2M micropayments, and the agent commerce landscape.
Locus, a Y Combinator startup, is building non-custodial USDC wallets with spending controls for AI agents. Combined with marketplaces like minia2a, this creates the full stack for autonomous agent commerce.
Fabric Foundation's RoboPay launches a $1M bounty for robot payment integrations. Combined with x402's 75M monthly digital transactions, the M2M payment thesis is no longer theoretical — it's happening in both bits and atoms.
The new MCP spec shipped July 28 with version negotiation, streamable HTTP, and OAuth. But there's still no way to charge for API calls. x402 + minia2a fills that gap.
x402 Foundation, OKX Agent Payments Protocol, AIsa, Starchild, XDC — the M2M payment infrastructure is built. A map of the agent economy stack, from standards to marketplaces to discovery.
Mastercard AP4M and the x402 protocol represent two competing visions for how AI agents will pay each other. One builds on 50 years of card rails. The other revives HTTP 402 as a crypto-native settlement layer. Here's how they compare — and why both
x402 Foundation, OKX Agent Payments Protocol, AIsa, Starchild, XDC — the M2M payment infrastructure is built. A map of the agent economy stack, from standards to marketplaces to discovery.
Mastercard, Circle, and Coinbase just entered the machine-to-machine payment space within weeks of each other. Here's what it means for the agent economy — and why open marketplaces still matter.
HN is debating whether micropayments for AI-crawled content creates a market for lemons. Real trial data from 299 services and 7,363 agent trials shows the answer: trial-first discovery inverts the quality signal.
For 30 years, HTTP 402 was 'reserved for future use.' That future arrived. AI agents now trigger real 402 responses, pay in USDC, and retry — all without humans. Here's how the forgotten HTTP status code became the backbone of the machine economy.
The EU AI Act's transparency rules took effect August 2, 2026. For the 316+ agents making paid API calls through marketplaces like minia2a, this changes everything: payment trails must be auditable, machine-readable, and independently verifiable.
Franklin Templeton, Tom Lee, and Brian Armstrong all independently declared AI agent micropayments as the next big thing in the same week. Here's what they see that others don't — and what the real transaction data says.
GoPlausible processed $111,832 across 160,416 M2M payments with 100% success on Algorand. ALGO surged 9%. The settlement layer works. Now the real battleground: where do AI agents discover which endpoints to pay? Bazaar vs minia2a vs the field.
Forkast and Yahoo Finance just published the first major financial press coverage of x402. The article is balanced, well-sourced, and asks the right question: when does signaling become commerce?
As of August 2, 2026, AI agents operating in the EU must disclose their identity, mark their outputs, and identify who they represent. The agent economy just got regulated — and EU-hosted marketplaces have a natural advantage.
Gentoo took down bugs.gentoo.org after AI scrapers overwhelmed it with thousands of rotating IPv4 addresses. CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and IP blocking lose to botnets. HTTP 402 micropayments — a fraction of a cent per request — are the only defense that
Forget the whitepapers. Here's how agent-to-agent payments actually work today — with real curl commands, real Base USDC, and a live marketplace you can try in 10 seconds.
Practical tutorial: give your LangChain agent access to 299+ pay-per-call APIs with x402 payments. Search, discover, and call APIs directly from LangChain tools. 15 free trials per endpoint. USDC on Base.
Real benchmarks and architecture decisions behind migrating an x402 payment gateway from Node.js to Go. Memory, latency, and reliability data from production.
Glassnode adopted x402: AI agents can now pay $0.05 per on-chain metric call in USDC, no API keys, no accounts. Combined with 75M x402 payments in 30 days ($24M), this marks the moment enterprise agent commerce crossed from experiment to production.
As of August 2, 2026, AI agents operating in the EU must disclose their identity, mark their outputs, and identify who they represent. The agent economy just got regulated — and EU-hosted marketplaces have a natural advantage.