An online payment protocol launched by Coinbase in May that permits AI agents to transact stablecoins over the web has seen a greater than 10,000% increase in transaction activity over the past month.
At the time, Coinbase said x402 fixes “the Internet’s first mistake” by reviving the Internet Communication Protocol’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol 402 – or HTTP 402 – to create a seamless, native payment system on the Internet.
This allows AI – and humans – to pay directly while using a web site or app: they request something, receive an HTTP 402 “Payment Required” prompt, after which send a signed stablecoin payment, which x402 then robotically verifies. No bank cards required.
According to Dune Analytics data, there have been nearly 500,000 x402 transactions between October 14 and October 20, a rise of 10,780% in comparison with the numbers 4 weeks earlier.
On Friday, transaction activity increased even further, with other data from Dune Analytics showing a record 239,505 transactions were made, while Thursday saw a record transaction volume of $332,000.
Source: Brian Armstrong
This comes because the crypto division of tech-focused enterprise capital firm a16z mentioned agentic AI in its State of Crypto 2025 report earlier this week – where it estimated that autonomous transactions could reach $30 trillion by 2030.
Without the necessity for human intervention in managing API calls, storage and computation, agent AIs could enable all the pieces from self-driving taxis that cover their very own costs with stablecoins to apps that robotically use stablecoins to permanently store data, Coinbase development team members Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr said in August.
On a limited basis, AI agents are already trading crypto by analyzing market data, executing buy or sell orders, and optimizing portfolios in real time without human intervention.
CoinGecko lists x402 tokens as a brand new category
Developers are actually leveraging x402's design to launch tokens directly – fueling a wave of x402-based memecoin launches, as noted by KuCoin Ventures on X.
The surge led CoinGecko to think about x402 tokens as a brand new ecosystem that has grow to be a virtually $180 million market, up 266% within the last 24 hours.
Ethereum is best fitted to HTTP 402
Leffew and Murr said Ethereum's trustless settlement layer makes it the best blockchain for HTTP 402 implementation, noting that it makes billing and dispute chargebacks much more efficient than traditional processes.
“They need atomic payments, programmable policies and composable wallets. Ethereum and stablecoins give them exactly that.”
