The HTTP status code for "payment required" sat unused since 1999 because card fees made tiny payments impossible. AI agents changed that: an agent can't open a bank account, but it can sign a transaction. The Linux Foundation made the x402 Foundation operational with 40 members — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Google, AWS, Shopify, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple and Cloudflare among them — and agents ran 75 million payments through the protocol in 30 days.

We cover why the code sat unused for 27 years, why direct competitors all backed the same standard, and the tension nobody says out loud: an open standard whose volume runs overwhelmingly on one stablecoin, on one company's chain.

Read the full report: https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/c863b275-497f-426a-a9d5-a84f20f283f1

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