There has been recent x402 announcements from players like Coinbase Cloudflare Google.
What is the hype about? It is AI on stablecoin rails. (double buzzword kill)
HTTP 402 status code first came out in 1999, but was only a placeholder until now. Today, x402 is the new universal standard for AI payments for agentic commerce.
Traditionally, the internet has been built on credit card forms and payment intermediaries, with fees and friction. This has been fine, until the recent AI boom, when we realized the old methods are incompatible with machine payments.
Today, we do not expect and trust agents to fill in credit card numbers for us, and legacy rails do not support micropayments (you just can't make 10 cents business payments easily).
So how does the new world of x402 look?
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Sellers: monetize APIs, media content, and data.
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Buyers: humans and AI agents access these paid services without needing to sign up for accounts or make manual payments.
Google also announced its Agent Payments Protocol, an open agentic payment protocol to validate payments. There are two new ways to shop:
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Human-in-the-loop (human signs off on the final cart mandate)
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Human not in the loop (user agents transact directly with business agents)
With these announcements, x402 opens up new commercial business models, more seamless than before, mainly around micropayments:
(1) Pay-per-use data, premium content, research
(2) Creator micropayment and tipping
(3) Pay-per-use compute, storage
(4) Agentic commerce built around MCP workflows
(5) AI-optimized product recommendations and bundles
Many subscription business models will shift into micropayments at scale. We may even see more autonomous business systems, where AI systems manage their own finances.
So what is the impact of x402 on us in APAC?
I think -
(1) First, there will be a new commercial models (like microtransactions).
(2) We will see more programmatic shopping, with better product discovery and shopping optimization.
Shopping will become more efficient between merchants and across time (agents can camp out for seasonal discounts for you).
There will be a rise of (vertical) aggregator businesses, deploying shopping bots to scan the broad market for discounts.
(3) Businesses need to ready themselves at the receiving end of programmatic shopping. Be it via exposing your business information to be well discovered by agents, or via well structured data or be MCP ready. (these are roadmaps of aidesk.us btw)
(4) We can expect a rise of more 402-powered landing pages, instead of QR codes or credit cards, to collect money globally, which is great for for digital-first, cross-border startups.
(5) Rise of AI consulting and delivery. Pay-per-use to retrieve your expert knowledge via your vertically trained agent. (like legal, tax advisory, design)
(6) Early adopters will naturally be web3, digital media, SaaS, and data/API businesses.
#x402