Coinbase-Incubated x402 Protocol Launches AI Robot Application Store Agent.market

On April 21, the x402 Foundation, incubated by Coinbase, announced the launch of the unified platform Agent.market, aimed at providing an ‘app store’-like service entry for AI robots. The platform is built on the x402 protocol, which helps users and robots access hundreds of tools and services. The x402 protocol is named after the unused HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code, allowing websites, APIs, and AI robots to request and receive instant micro-payments through blockchain and traditional payment channels. The protocol is managed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation and has received support from over 20 organizations and crypto companies, including Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Google, Visa, Base, Circle, and the Solana Foundation. At launch, Agent.market will cover seven major categories: reasoning, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading, with service providers including OpenAI and Venice (reasoning); Bloomberg and CoinGecko (data); LinkedIn, X, and AgentMail (social); AWS Lambda, QuickNode, and Alchemy (infrastructure); as well as Bankr and Coinbase RAT (trading). Providers can join the marketplace without permission. Erik Reppel, the creator of the x402 protocol, stated that there are currently about 69,000 active agent robots on the protocol, having completed over 165 million transactions with a total transaction volume of $50 million. He noted that x402-based agent commerce is reshaping the customer acquisition activation costs for businesses, as robots can now access services at a very low setup cost without the need for API keys.