Coinbase-incubated x402 protocol unveils app-store for AI bots

The x402 protocol has unveiled a new unified platform for accessing the goods and services available to humans and bots on the Coinbase-incubated x402 protocol.

Dubbed Agentic.market, the platform will help surface the hundreds of tools now accessible via the internet-native payments protocol.

Erik Reppel, the head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and creator of the x402 protocol, said Agentic.market is essentially an "app store for agents."

X402, named after the previously unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, allows websites, APIs, and AI-powered agents to request and receive instant micropayments via blockchain-based and traditional payment rails.

The protocol is governed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation, with support from over 20 leading tech and crypto firms, including Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Google, and Visa, as well as Base, Circle, and the Solana Foundation, to name a few.

At launch, Agentic.market will feature services from dozens of providers placed into seven major Inference, Data, Media, Search, Social, Infrastructure, and Trading categories.

This includes providers like OpenAI and Venice in the inference category, Bloomberg and CoinGecko in data, LinkedIn, X, and AgentMail in social, AWS Lambda, QuickNode, and Alchemy in infrastructure, and Bankr and Coinbase RAT in trading.

Providers can permissionlessly join the marketplace.

Agentic economics

Reppel noted that x402 and the wider world of agentic commerce — where AI bots direct transactions with or without human oversight — represents something of a new business line for many online service providers. There are an estimated 69K live agentic bots on x402 that have cumulatively made over 165 million transactions, representing $50 million in volume.

Most of the services available on Agentic.market are paid, with some charging an "agentic premium" to bots for per-use access, Reppel said.

"But if you're using it a ton, you're more likely to go subscribe and then it brings your costs down," Reppel said, speaking to the unit economics of running a bot. "So that's actually, I think, a pretty healthy thing for businesses to offer."

"It's a clear indicator of untapped demand where someone has to have actually quite a lot of intention to pay for a subscription to use a service," Reppel said. "You either leak all those people out to a generous free tier or you charge them per request — that actually becomes interesting in aggregate if you have like thousands of people doing that."

Reppel also noted that agentic commerce via x402 also changes the activation costs startups or other businesses face when looking to attract users, given that agents can now access services with minimal setup costs or without requiring an API key.

"There's probably a very large latent demand for products that just wasn't expressible because of how API keys, subscriptions and fees on microtransactions has worked," Reppel said.

Editor's note: Corrects URL for agentic.market.