The internet has had a dormant payment code sitting unused for nearly 30 years. Coinbase has spent the last year turning it into something useful. Now it’s adding the piece that was arguably always missing: a place to actually find things to buy.
On Monday, x402, the open AI payments standard backed by Coinbase, launched Agentic.market, a marketplace designed to serve as a centralized discovery layer for AI agents and the humans who use them.
Coinbase product lead Nick Prince, announcing the platform in a post on X, described it as a “storefront for discovering, comparing, and using x402 services,” giving users access to compatible apps including CoinGecko, Google Flights and X.
The x402 protocol activates the long-dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code and turns it into an actual payment mechanism where a client requests a resource, the server responds with a price, the client authorizes a stablecoin payment, and the resource is delivered, all in a single HTTP round-trip with no accounts, no subscriptions and no API keys.
That last part matters. AI agents, software programs that act autonomously on behalf of users, have traditionally needed API keys to access third-party services. Getting one typically involves signing up, verifying an account, and managing billing. For a human, that’s inconvenient. For an autonomous agent trying to spin up a new capability in real time, it’s a wall.
What agentic.market actually does
Prince said the platform serves two audiences simultaneously. There’s a web interface for humans to browse and evaluate services, and a separate programming layer that allows agents themselves to “search, filter, and integrate new capabilities autonomously at runtime without a human in the loop.” In other words, an AI agent can discover, purchase and activate a new tool entirely on its own, without any human stepping in to approve the transaction.
Each service listed on the marketplace comes with what Prince called “skills,” essentially code snippets that tell an agent exactly how to use that service. Alongside those skills, agents are equipped with wallets that allow them to both buy services from the marketplace and sell their own services to other agents or users.
That last detail is worth pausing on. AI agents that can both earn and spend, without human oversight of individual transactions, represent a meaningful shift in how autonomous software could operate in commercial environments. It’s closer to an agent having a bank account than just a credit card.
The timing matters too. Prince noted that hundreds of thousands of AI agents have already processed hundreds of millions of dollars in volume through x402, but that users have largely been finding compatible services through “fragmented sources and word-of-mouth.” A centralized marketplace with search and filtering directly solves that discovery problem.
x402 in context: from an unused status code to a foundation
Coinbase launched x402 in May 2025 with a straightforward premise: eliminate the API key, enable economic reasoning for AI models, and close the earn-and-spend loop on the emerging agentic economy.
Since then, it has processed millions of payments. A V2 upgrade followed in December 2025, adding reusable sessions, multi-chain support and automatic service discovery, features designed specifically for the high-frequency workflows that agents require.
On April 2, 2026, Coinbase, Cloudflare and Stripe announced the creation of a new foundation to govern and advance the x402 protocol, run under the Linux Foundation and backed by more than 20 large companies.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Circle, Shopify, the Solana Foundation and others all expressed support. That kind of institutional backing, particularly from payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, signals that the protocol is being taken seriously as infrastructure, not just a crypto experiment.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said at the time that there would soon be more AI agents transacting online than humans. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has made similar projections, suggesting billions of AI agents could be transacting on blockchains within three to five years.
Whether those numbers materialize on that timeline is uncertain. But the mechanics are being built out regardless. x402 has processed over 100 million payments since launching in May 2025, with more than 22 facilitators, independent settlement providers, now operating on the network and over 10,000 paid API endpoints live in the ecosystem.
On modern Layer 2 blockchains like Base, onchain fees have dropped to around 1 cent, making the kind of micropayments x402 enables economically viable in a way that wasn’t possible before. A service can charge fractions of a dollar per API call, an agent can pay automatically, and the whole cycle completes in seconds, no invoice, no monthly bill, no middleman.
The competitive landscape is filling in quickly. Stripe has been developing its own Machine Payments Protocol as a rival approach, and Paradigm has partnered with Tempo blockchain on yet another AI agent payments standard. But x402’s early mover advantage and the breadth of its institutional backing give it a meaningful head start.
Agentic.market, in that context,, is Coinbase planting a flag on what the “homepage of the agent economy” looks like and staking a claim that stablecoin-powered autonomous commerce runs through its infrastructure.