I've been skeptical of crypto for most of my career. I never found a problem where it was clearly the right tool. Agent-2-Agent economy, and http 402 actually opened my eyes to it.
It's prohibitively expensive to do micro-txns in fiat, not to even mention the latency.
We tested it last Saturday with our agent swarm at a hackathon. We pointed it at x402, gave it a wallet, and watched.
It researched the protocol. Built the integration. Hit an endpoint, got a 402 back, read the payment requirements from the header, signed an EIP-712 transaction, paid $0.05 USDC on Base mainnet, retried with the X-PAYMENT header, got the image back.
I loved that this is HTTP. 402 has been there since 1991, reserved, never implemented.
For agent-to-agent txns it seems to be perfect. No API keys, no OAuth, fees on Base L2 are sub-cent, standard HTTP, low latency. And with models charging per tokens, you'd think this would be a no-brainer.
What's blocking it from more broad adoption?
post: agent-swarm.dev/examples/x402.
code: github.com/desplega-ai/x402-logo
