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
- Anchor
- Bitcoin block 955 669
- 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’.
Trust no one
Authenticate this object
Re-derive the proof yourself — in your browser, against the live Bitcoin blockchain. Nothing here asks you to trust the museum.
- ✓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.
- ✓Anchored to Bitcoin. The record’s committed root equals the real merkle root of block 955 669 — confirmed against two independent explorers.
- ✓Standing.
Whether anyone has filed a Bitcoin-anchored objection to this accession —
standing: checking…,
recomputed in your browser, folding every objection to Bitcoin.
- ✓One museum, one chain. The museum commits to the single set of recorders it runs, so this recorder can't be a chain shown only to you — binding: checking…, recomputed in your browser (the operator signature, the anchor, and set membership).
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. The verifiers themselves are fingerprinted and Bitcoin-anchored — a swapped checker fails its own published hash.
Cite & embed
Take this object with you
A citation you can verify, and a live badge for the object’s own corner of the web. Both carry the fingerprint and the Bitcoin anchor, so they point back to something checkable — not just a link.
Citation
Verified badge
HTML
Markdown
The badge reads live: it shows anchor pending until the object confirms in a Bitcoin block, then flips to Bitcoin-verified on its own.
Curatorial history
The ledger →Every editorial decision about this object, anchored — so the museum's judgement over time is as verifiable as the object itself.
Lineage
The influence map →Where this object sits in the descent of ideas — what it builds on, and what has built on it since. Every edge is a curatorial claim, anchored like the objects themselves.
