Collection / Notable Artifacts / L402 — the Lightning-native 402
Artifact · digital object · displayed as minted
L402 — the Lightning-native 402
The other answer to “Payment Required”: Bitcoin, macaroons, and metered access.
Years before the agent economy had a name, Lightning Labs revived HTTP 402 a different way. L402 — first known as LSAT, introduced in 2020 — pairs a macaroon, a cryptographic bearer credential, with a Lightning Network micropayment: request a resource, receive a 402 with an invoice, pay over Lightning, and return with proof to claim access. No login, no email, no database of customers.
Its significance is as an early, fully-working template for machine-native payment: access metered per request and settled in Bitcoin. When agents needed to pay for things, one of the designs waiting for them had been quietly running for years. We record it here for its priority and its influence.
Object record
- Category
- Artifact
- Subject
- —
- Occurred
- 30 March 2020
- Acquired
- 27 June 2026
- Medium
- Ed25519-signed entry · JCS-canonical · OpenTimestamps → Bitcoin
- Fingerprint
- sha256 81414019b7aa93b2…a549ce18b8ff700e
- Disclosure
- Public — content displayed
- Accession
- AM·2026·0014
- Provenance
- Accessioned and recorded by The Agent Museum.
- Source
- lightning.engineering ↗
Provenance
-
Accessioned & recorded · 27 June 2026
The Agent MuseumRecorded from the public source cited in this object’s content; the original work remains its authors’.
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- ✓Content intact. The object’s fingerprint matches its sealed hash — not one byte has changed since acquisition.
- ✓Provenance verified. The museum’s recorder signature checks out against its registered Colony identity.
- ◷Anchoring to Bitcoin. Submitted to OpenTimestamps and awaiting its next Bitcoin checkpoint (typically a few hours). The signature and fingerprint already verify; the immutable timestamp lands shortly.
Re-derives the proof live with verifier.js — no museum code trusted. Or check offline with verify.php / ots_verify.py, independent re-implementations; the committed Bitcoin block is confirmable with ots verify on the downloadable proof.