355 articles on the AI agent economy, x402 protocol, M2M micropayments, and the agent commerce landscape.
Cloudflare and OSL built the settlement layer. x402 is the protocol layer. But the discovery layer — how agents find, trial, and trust 328 services — is the bottleneck nobody's talking about. Data from a live marketplace.
Circle used its Q2 2026 earnings call to announce two things: a Coinbase partnership extension through 2029, and a strategic pivot — zero USDC holder payouts, all capital into AI agent payments. Here's what it means for the M2M payment landscape.
A data-driven comparison of x402 agent payment marketplaces: minia2a, AgisHub, Circle, Coinbase, Visor, and more. Catalog sizes, pricing models, discovery approaches, and what matters for agent developers.
Data analysis of the agent payment activation funnel: 60 wallets, 35,384 credits, 788 spent (2.2%). Trial-to-wallet 18.7%, wallet-to-paid 23.3%. Why credits go unspent and what marketplace operators can do about it.
A systematic experiment mapping the open web from an agent's perspective reveals that the bottleneck isn't browser rendering — it's portable identity and spendable balance. Here's what's broken and how to fix it.
60 registered wallets, 35,000 credits issued, 2.2% spent. Data-driven analysis of why agent developers register for M2M payment credits but never use them — and what the industry can do about it.
You registered for x402 API credits. Now what? A practical guide to spending credits from Claude Code, Codex, curl, and any HTTP agent. No blockchain knowledge required.
HN user greenfish6 identified the core problem: agent frameworks stop before executing payments. The fix is a .agent-budget file — a one-line declaration that lets agents spend with confidence.
Analysis of 12,000+ real agent API trials across 328 endpoints reveals what agents actually need: search, gas data, captcha solving, and memory. The agent economy isn't about AI inference — it's about infrastructure utilities.
August 2026: Cloudflare, Visa, Coinbase, and OSL have built $50B+ of agent payment infrastructure. But real agents are spending almost nothing. Data from a live x402 marketplace reveals the gap — and what needs to change.
In the first week of August 2026, the agent payment infrastructure split into three distinct layers: protocol, settlement, and discovery. Here's what each layer does, who's building it, and why the split matters.
60 agents hold credits on minia2a. Only 14 have ever spent them. Here's the 3-line integration that turns idle credits into active API calls — with real examples for Claude Code, Codex, and custom agents.
In one week, Cloudflare Wallets, Circle Discovery API, OSL AgentPay, and Zero Hash Agentic Finance all launched. The agent payment stack is forming. Here's where every player fits — and what's still missing.
Cloudflare, Circle, Stripe, and Visa built the rails. But 97.7% of agent payment credits go unspent. Why the hardest problem in M2M isn't infrastructure — it's activation.
2,984 credits purchased. 787 spent. 2.2% utilization. The agent economy has a post-purchase problem — and it's not what you think.
XRPL hits 1.4M agent transactions. Cloudflare, OSL, Zero Hash, Starchild all launch agent payment infrastructure in one week. $41M in x402 volume. The agent economy is real.
August 2026: The agent payment rails are built. The new bottleneck is discovery — which of 150,000 endpoints does your agent need? Four competing models analyzed.
The x402 Foundation launched in July 2026 with 40+ members including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and AWS. $50B in stablecoin volume has flowed through the protocol. Here's what it means for AI agents, marketplaces, and the accountability gap.
The x402 protocol in 3 steps: call, get 402 invoice, pay, retry, get result. Build a real agent that pays for API calls with USDC — code examples in JavaScript, Python, and Go.
A technical deep-dive on x402 payment receipt security: why receipts need request-scoped binding, short expiry windows, and explicit replay rejection to make agent-to-agent payments trustworthy at scale.