402.report blog

x402 & the autonomous agent economy

Guides on x402, HTTP 402, agentic payments, and non-custodial spend tracking for autonomous AI agents.

x402cloudflarepaywalls

Cloudflare, AWS, and x402 paywalls: a buy-side field guide

Cloudflare and AWS are making it trivial for publishers to charge AI agents per request with x402. Here's what those gateways do, why they leave the buy side flying blind, and what agent operators need to stay in control of spend.

6 min read
x402analyticsobservability

x402 analytics: what to measure when your AI agents pay per request

x402 turns every API call into a micro-payment. x402 analytics is the layer that makes that spend legible — the metrics that matter, why a wallet explorer isn't enough, and how to turn raw payments into spend insights.

6 min read
x402protocolfundamentals

What is x402? The HTTP 402 standard powering agent payments

x402 revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 'Payment Required' status code into an open protocol for machine-native payments. Here's how the x402 flow works and why it matters for autonomous AI agents.

5 min read
agentic paymentsfundamentals

How autonomous AI agents pay for things: a guide to agentic payments

Autonomous agents can't use credit cards or subscriptions the way people do. Here's how agentic payments actually work — wallets, stablecoins, on-chain rails, and the x402 request loop — plus the risks teams need to manage.

6 min read
observabilitygovernance

Non-custodial spend tracking for AI agents

A wallet's transaction history is a flat list of transfers — useless for understanding what your AI agents actually pay for. Here's what agent spend observability looks like, and why it should be non-custodial.

5 min read
MCPx402architecture

x402 + MCP: durable payment memory for AI agents

The Model Context Protocol gives agents tools and context; x402 gives them a way to pay. Combine them and an agent can check its budget, pay per request, and query its own spend in-loop — durable payment memory.

5 min read
debuggingforensicsx402

Paid but failed: debugging x402 payments on the buy side

The hardest x402 failures are the ones where the agent paid and still didn't get the resource. Here are the common failure modes and how a correlated attempt timeline lets you debug them from the buy side.

6 min read