Galaxy Research 10,000-Word Report: x402 and the "Leviathan Moment" of the AI Economy
Artificial intelligence agents are poised to transform the internet by enabling autonomous task execution, reducing the need for direct human interaction. Galaxy Research highlights the emergence of Agentic Payment Standards (APS), particularly the x402 protocol, which allows AI agents to use cryptocurrencies like stablecoins for seamless, on-demand payments for digital services, data access, and API calls. Developed by Coinbase, x402 leverages the HTTP 402 status code to facilitate machine-native transactions, eliminating the need for traditional payment rails or API key management.
The protocol operates through a stack involving clients (agents), servers, coordinators, and blockchain settlement layers, with recent upgrades (x402 V2) enhancing support for subscriptions, reusable sessions, and service discovery. Early adoption saw speculative activity, but use cases are expanding into data-as-a-service, agent-to-agent transactions, and infrastructure payments.
While x402 excels in micro-payments for digital resources, traditional players like Visa, PayPal, and Stripe are also developing agentic commerce solutions for regulated, high-value e-commerce transactions. The integration of APS could significantly improve capital efficiency for software production by replacing subscriptions with pay-per-use models, reducing friction in experimentation and development.
In the long term, blockchain-based payments are likely to operate silently in the background, complementing rather than replacing existing systems, and becoming a foundational layer for the AI-driven economy without requiring end-user engagement with crypto directly.
比推01/09 00:08
