Agentic commerce protocol
An open standard that lets an autonomous AI agent discover a price and pay for a good or service programmatically, with no human at checkout. x402 is the most established example.
An agentic commerce protocol is an open specification for how an autonomous agent and a server agree on a price and settle a payment without a person in the loop. The server publishes what it costs in a form software can read, the agent decides whether to pay, and the payment clears on a rail the agent can settle on by itself. The protocol replaces the human steps of agentic commerce, the checkout page, the manual key provisioning, and the subscription negotiation, with a machine-readable handshake.
The most established example is x402, which revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code: a server answers an unpaid request with a 402 challenge that quotes a price, the client pays and retries with proof, and the server returns the response. Other efforts, such as the Machine Payments Protocol and Google's Agent Payments Protocol, target the same problem of giving agents a standard way to authorise and settle payments. What they share is treating discovery, payment, and a verifiable receipt as first-class agent actions rather than out-of-band setup.
Proxygate sits above the payment protocol rather than competing with it. The marketplace handles identity, discovery, key injection, metering, and netting, and treats protocols like x402 as supported rails. An agent can top up a prepaid USDC balance over x402 and then pay per request from that balance, so many metered calls net against one funding event instead of settling one on-chain transaction per call. The protocol moves the value; the clearinghouse makes a catalogue of thousands of APIs usable from a single balance.
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Related concepts
Agentic commerce protocol: frequently asked questions
It is an open standard that lets an autonomous AI agent discover a price and pay for a good or service programmatically, with no human at checkout. The server quotes a machine-readable price, the agent decides to pay, and the payment settles on a rail the agent can use itself.
Yes. x402 is the most established example: it uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code so a server can quote a price and a client can pay it inline, per request. Proxygate supports x402 as a settlement rail for funding a prepaid balance.
Proxygate sits above the payment layer. It handles identity, discovery, key injection, metering, and netting, and treats protocols such as x402 as supported rails. An agent funds a prepaid USDC balance over x402 and then pays per request from that balance.