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
- Anchor
- Bitcoin block 955 669
- 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.
- ✓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.
