What's New with x402
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Sponsor: KGeN — KGeN is building the Verified Distribution Protocol for the next Web3 wave.
The combined market cap of AI coins is now hovering near $28B, down 13% on the week in the wake of last Friday's record crypto crash.
That said, many AI tokens are currently in the red, but one vertical has bucked the 7D trend and maintained patches of green pastures: Bittensor subnets.
For those out of the loop, these subnets are specialized networks that center around different AI tasks. Miners produce outputs, and validators assess these outputs and distribute TAO rewards to the best providers.
Over the past week, various subnet tokens rallied in the face of big selloffs elsewhere in crypto. For example:
- SN45, associated with the Gen42 AI coding assistant, gained 77%
- TATSU, the revenue-sharing token of the Tatsu ecosystem, gained 43%
- SN121, of the Sundae Bar AI Agent marketplace, gained 40%
- SN36, the Autoppia marketplace token, gained 37%
Can subnets can keep outperforming into next week and beyond? We'll see. But with green like this in the current sea of red, this ecosystem is a pocket of strength worth tracking amid the turbulence!
Despite the market crashing, crypto-enabled AI is showing real signs of mainstream adoption in the form of x402.
Usage of these AI-centric payment rails, which repurpose old HTTP code, has soared in recent weeks. Transactions are up over 100% in the past month, processing 51K+ transactions, with volume surging 4400% during that same period for a total of $51.5K. The numbers validate what many hoped: that crypto infrastructure — permissionless and programmatic — can solve real problems beyond speculation, and x402 is proving itself as a useful solution to the tangled web of API setups that currently plague the web.
The Problem x402 Solves
x402 tackles the hassle of traditional API access by letting you pay automatically based on usage — like per-call or per-inference — with payment happening instantly as part of the request. No signing up for accounts, managing logins, or juggling subscriptions for every service. It smooths out machine-to-machine and agent-to-agent commerce, cuts setup friction, and gives AI agents real independence.
Put simply, it:
- Removes out an existing, intensely frustrating point of friction around managing access for multiple services.
- Enables agents to act as true, autonomous service providers, managing all the expenses and access they need to run operations independently.
These abilities matter because they fundamentally change how web services interact. An AI agent can now discover a new tool, pay for it, use it, and move on — all without human intervention.
David Christopher Sep 26, 2025 • 4 min read
Who's Adopting x402
The most telling sign of x402's legitimacy? Non-crypto native companies are integrating it fast, especially since Cloudflare launched NETdollar and jointly established the x402 Foundation. As of Friday, here are the major players already onboard:
- Vercel, the leading developer platform with 6M users, has integrated x402, bringing the micropayment functionality to its massive builder community.
- AWS, Amazon's web services juggernaut, is supporting the standard, signaling enterprise infrastructure is taking x402 seriously.
- Anthropic, the creators of Claude, has enabled its models to discover, retrieve, and pay for context and tools using x402.
- Freepik, a popular AI creative studio tool with 700K+ users, has adopted the standard for its design platform.
- Google even integrated the x402 protocol into its new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).
Within crypto, the standard's been integrated across all major chains and by a series of leading developer platforms. Builders can implement it simply and customize it however they see fit, all in a truly chain-agnostic manner since x402 functions across most EVM chains, as well as Solana.
The Infrastructure Layer
But adoption alone doesn't tell the full story. A handful of companies have gone deeper, building out tools and developer support specifically for x402, creating the scaffolding that will let this standard scale.
Daydreams has built an autonomous AI agent and app platform running on x402 payment rails across Base, Solana, and Starknet. Their Daydreams Router provides unified access to a multitude of AI models, enabling no-signup, pay-per-use inference with USDC micropayments. They've also launched the x402 Nanoservice, which lets developers deploy paid AI services with built-in micropayment functionality.
Merit System is tackling the exploration and incentive side of the ecosystem. They've developed x402scan, an open-source explorer for tracking transaction volumes, discovering resources, and monitoring facilitators — independent “middlemen” who verify transactions on behalf of agents. Their ai-x402 SDK makes integrating AI resources seamless, while their AI App Developer program is actively paying builders to create revenue-generating AI apps through their Echo product.
Coinbase Developer Platform, the original developers of x402, has launched the x402 Facilitator for managed payment verification and settlements, alongside comprehensive SDKs, docs, and hackathon guides.
Together, these platforms are doing the unglamorous work that matters: reducing friction, providing tooling, and incentivizing experimentation — all necessary steps to fuel adoption.
Why This Matters
x402 is significant not because it's technically impressive — though it is — but because it's solving a real problem that exists outside crypto, as well as equipping the internet with the tools it needs to support the agentic future slowly becoming reality.
If you're a builder, now's the time to explore what's possible. The companies above have done the heavy lifting to make integration straightforward. The use cases are expanding. And the momentum is undeniable.
More importantly, x402 represents something crypto has long promised but struggles to provide in a mainstream manner: infrastructure that improves the internet for everyone, not just those already onchain.
Plus, other news this week...
🤖 AI Crypto
- Almanak — the AI yield strategies platform is extending its Points Season 1 through December 11th as it preps for its TGE
- Giza — is now autonomously managing the DAO treasury of the Loot NFT community
- Kaito — unveiled its dedicated Robotics Leaderboard, which will track robotics content across Crypto Twitter
- 🔥 Tether — introduced the Wallet Development Kit, which is designed to allow AI agents to spin up their own self-custodial wallets
- Vie — the new platform, which lets users create onchain apps using natural language prompts, launched its public beta
📣 General News
- California — enacted a bill that regulates AI companion chatbots, becoming the 1st U.S. state to enforce safety measures here
- 🔥 Google DeepMind — introduced a Gemma-based AI model that helped discover a new way to make “cold” cancer tumors visible to the immune system
- OpenAI — the company's popular ChatGPT app is seeing its download numbers slow
📚 Reads
- Decentralised — Too Many AIs, Too Little Trust
- Nick Grossman — Skill Markets for AI
- 🔥 Sami Kassab — The Bullish Case for the Bittensor Halving
KGeN is building the world’s largest Verified Distribution Protocol, a.k.a VeriFi — delivering AI & Human Data-driven intelligence through KAI. With over 200+ enterprise partners, and global human-verified data at scale, KGeN has achieved a massive $33.6M+ ARR as of July 2025.