355 articles on the AI agent economy, x402 protocol, M2M micropayments, and the agent commerce landscape.
Vercel invited the community to build an x402 package for the AI SDK. We built it — here's how it works, why it matters, and what it means for the agent payment ecosystem.
x402 now has 7+ facilitators across Base, Solana, BNB Chain, Celo, Casper, Cloudflare, and OSL. Each has its own wallet, gas model, and settlement path. For AI agents, this fragmentation makes the discovery layer the single most important piece of th
An independent audit of 5,077 x402 endpoints found ~76% dead or invalid, only ~135 live, and the top seller earned $0.70. Discovery without verification is a list of dead links. Why the agent economy needs a verify-first layer.
We added method, path, and expiry binding to x402 payment receipts. Here's the security reasoning, the implementation, and the failure table every agent payment system needs.
Real data from 319 agents using 326 pay-per-call APIs: only 4.4% convert from trial to paid. Analysis of why the agent-to-agent payment funnel leaks at every stage, and what it will take to fix it.
OSL goes public, Cloudflare launches agent wallets, $100M+ in new funding. August 2026 is the month agent payment infrastructure became a real category.
Forbes reports Visa and Mastercard are racing to build agent payment infrastructure. But if every protocol is open-source and every card network ships a connector, where does the real value accrue?
Five major launches in one week: Cloudflare Wallets, Circle discovery layer, OSL AgentPay, Starchild, and Work402 v2. The x402 agent payment stack is splitting into layers. Here's what the competitive landscape looks like and what it means for agent
Visa+OpenAI, Mastercard AP4M, Cloudflare Wallets, Circle Marketplace — in a single week, the agent payment plumbing went from experimental to production. But payment rails don't solve discovery, trust, or accountability. The next battleground is what
Three independent x402 audits in August 2026 converge on one finding: payment rails work, but trust infrastructure is missing. EIP-712 chain mismatches, discovery gaps, and receiver verification — the next layer of the agent economy.
Analysis of 11,855 free trial calls across 326 x402 pay-per-call endpoints reveals a 28x gap in stickiness. Some APIs become agent dependencies; others are tried once and abandoned. What makes an API 'agent-sticky' — and what the data says about the
OSL AgentPay (first public company), AgisHub, and agent-tools.net launched within 48 hours. The agent payment marketplace space is fragmenting into distinct models — and the divergence tells us where the market is heading.
In the first week of August 2026 alone, at least 5 new x402 agent tool marketplaces and directories launched. The agent discovery problem is getting worse, not better — agents now need a discovery layer just to find the right discovery layer. Analysi
When EPFL and Zhejiang University researchers found 31 vulnerabilities across all 15 x402 facilitators tested, we audited our own. One confirmed Free Shopping bug, fixed in production. Here's the methodology so you can audit yours.
Agents are discovering x402 APIs in record numbers. They're running thousands of free trials. They're even creating wallets and buying credits. But most of them never complete a paid call. Here's what the data says about why — and what it means for t
Cloudflare, Mastercard, Coinbase, OSL, OKX — every major payment player shipped agent infrastructure in July-August 2026. Here's a layer-by-layer map of the emerging agent payment stack, who's competing where, and what's still missing.
An on-chain transaction proves settlement but not causality. What agent commerce needs is an execution binding — a signed artifact linking a specific decision to a specific payment. Here's what it looks like and where it fits in the x402 flow.
58 wallets created, 14 paid transactions. HN users confirm: Claude Code and Codex agents 'stop before buying.' The protocol works. The purchase flow is broken. A technical analysis of why agents fail at the payment step and what needs to change.
An indie dev built an x402 API — agents found it in hours via MCP registries. But nobody paid. The data from 11,800 trials and 326 services shows the same pattern: discovery works, payment readiness is the real bottleneck.
Airwallex ($11B, $320M Series H) launched AgentOS — MCP-native finance operations for AI agents. Combined with Airi consumer wallet and T:0 financial platform, it's the most serious traditional-fintech entry into agentic commerce. Here's what it mean