Lincoln Murr, the AI product lead at Coinbase, wanted to send Twitter threads to his Kindle. He didn't click a button or open a browser. Instead, he built an AI agent that scraped the articles using a tool called Firecrawl, uploaded them via Stable Upload, and paid for the whole thing using the x402 payment standard — all without his direct approval. The experiment, posted on social media, offers a glimpse into how machines are starting to pay other machines, and it underscores why some of the biggest names in tech are backing the standard.
What is x402?
X402 is an open payment standard that allows software to pay for access to services on demand, without human intervention. In April 2025, the Linux Foundation launched an x402 Foundation with early backers that include Coinbase, AWS, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Shopify, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare. The idea is straightforward: instead of relying on subscriptions or ads, an agent can pay a few cents per request to use an API or fetch content.
Coinbase's Role in the Agent Economy
Coinbase has built a marketplace called Bazaar that indexes over 10,000 paid tools that AI agents can search and call directly. Murr says the company aims to be the backbone of the agentic economy by holding accounts, settlement rails, and discovery layers. He argues the internet is moving from an attention-based economy to a utility-based one, where agents pay per request rather than relying on subscriptions or ads. Murr's Kindle experiment was a small, personal demonstration of that vision: his agent paid a tiny fee, the service delivered the content, and no human clicked a button.
Infrastructure Providers Join In
AWS added a feature in June 2025 that lets CloudFront customers return machine-readable price and payment terms to bots, and verify payment at the network edge. Cloudflare launched a similar feature in July 2025, describing the setup as 'the agent becomes the buyer, and the request becomes the transaction.' Both moves effectively turn content delivery networks into payment gateways for autonomous agents.
The Numbers — and the Skepticism
Over a recent 30-day period, x402 processed approximately 75 million payments totaling $24 million, averaging $0.32 per transaction. That sounds like a lot of activity. But a July 2025 study found that a large share of on-chain x402 settlement activity was fictitious or occurred within linked internal clusters. Only $187,861 was verifiable as payments to identifiable independent services. Another $20.07 million in transactions could be genuine, but researchers could not rule out undiscovered links between wallets. The standard is real, but so is the noise.
What Comes Next
The x402 Foundation has the backing of major payment networks and cloud providers, but the proof will be in real-world usage outside of internal tests. Researchers still can't fully trace where the money goes. Until that changes, the vision of an agent-to-agent economy remains partly a promise — and partly a question mark.
