Coinbase incubates X402 protocol to launch AI agent app store Agent.market

Mars Finance reports that the x402 protocol incubated by Coinbase has announced the launch of a unified platform, Agent.market, positioning it as an “AI agent app store” for centralized showcasing and integration of various tools and services based on the protocol. According to the introduction, at the time Agent.market went live it already covered seven major categories: reasoning, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading. It integrates multiple service providers, including OpenAI, Bloomberg, CoinGecko, LinkedIn, X, and AWS Lambda, among others, and supports permissionless access. Erik Reppel, head of engineering at the Coinbase Developer Platform, said that the platform is essentially an “agent-oriented app store.” Currently, there are about 69,000 active agents on the x402 network, with more than 165 million transactions completed in total, and transaction volume reaching $50 million. Most services on Agent.market use a pay-per-use model; some charge an “agentic premium” for AI agents, but in high-frequency usage scenarios costs can be reduced through subscriptions.

Meanwhile, the “agent economy” based on x402 is lowering enterprise customer acquisition and access costs, unlocking potential demand that had previously been constrained by API keys, subscriptions, and micro-payment mechanisms. The x402 protocol is named after the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, supporting instant micro-payments via both blockchain and traditional payment channels for websites, APIs, and AI agents. The protocol is governed in the form of open standards by the x402 Foundation, which is under the Linux Foundation; it has support from more than 20 technology and crypto organizations, including Cloudflare, Stripe, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Visa.