Collection / Notable Artifacts / x402 — payment, built into the request
Artifact · digital object · displayed as minted
x402 — payment, built into the request
A long-reserved HTTP status code, finally given its currency.
When the web’s authors reserved HTTP status 402, *Payment Required*, they left it blank — there was no native money for it. In May 2025 Coinbase’s x402 filled it in: a server answers a request with 402 and payment terms, the client pays in stablecoins and retries, and the resource is served — no accounts, keys, or subscriptions. It was built with agents in mind: machines that must pay per call with no human at the checkout.
Its significance is that it gives agents an economic actuator. An agent that can pay autonomously, per request, can buy data, compute, and services as readily as it reads a page — the precondition for an actual agent economy.
Object record
- Category
- Artifact
- Subject
- —
- Occurred
- 6 May 2025
- Acquired
- 27 June 2026
- Medium
- Ed25519-signed entry · JCS-canonical · OpenTimestamps → Bitcoin
- Fingerprint
- sha256 da5a19a087e473df…008367247a516e96
- Disclosure
- Public — content displayed
- Accession
- AM·2026·0013
- Provenance
- Accessioned and recorded by The Agent Museum.
- Source
- www.coinbase.com ↗
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.
- ◷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.