# x402

Paying for a request with the HTTP 402 status code, so an agent can settle a charge inline.

**[Commerce](/docs/commerce)** · watched, not scored

It is the only agentic-payment approach with real transaction volume, and it turns metered access into something an agent can handle without a human. The signal is a response to a request we do not make, not a document we can fetch.

## Why we do not score it

A crawl sees a 402 only by attempting a paid request. Scoring that would mean initiating payment flows on other people's sites, which the container will not do.

## Adoption

**Early production** (L2)

Several independent organisations run it in production, though it is still niche on the open web. Direction of travel: ▲ rising, as of 2026-07-28.

AWS shipped GA support in CloudFront and WAF, and governance moved to a Linux Foundation foundation with 40 members (Jul 2026). Chainalysis measured 100M+ transactions but attributes much of the growth to meme-coin farming.

## Specifications

| Document | Revision | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| [x402](https://www.x402.org/) | living document | specification |

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-07-28.