Judging by the recent craze for x402-related tokens, the protocol has already entered the hype phase. However, what sets x402 apart from other typical crypto topics is that major companies like Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Anthropic are actively adopting this technology, demonstrating that its infrastructure phase is rapidly progressing. Given the potential of agentic commerce, x402 is poised to successfully enter the mass adoption phase. However, the bottleneck lies in changing consumer psychology and trust structures. According to Accenture research, the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of agent-based commerce is consumers' lack of trust in AI agents. Despite this, Gartner predicts that by 2030, transactions controlled by AI agents will reach $30 trillion. Therefore, agent-based commerce will inevitably become a massive market in the future. This will also be a critical moment for blockchain to find its second global product-market fit (PMF) after stablecoins. The Hype, Infrastructure, and Adoption Cycle: From New Concepts to Widespread Adoption The crypto industry is a rapidly changing space. The rise and fall of new concepts can often be as short as a few months, and the simmering and waning of attention is more extreme than in other industries. Keywords such as NFTs, gaming, the metaverse, and modular blockchains have all experienced similar cycles. More specifically, recent concepts like "futarchy" have briefly captured market attention before quickly fading. With so many new concepts constantly emerging in the crypto industry, they face numerous obstacles to achieve meaningful adoption. I divide this process into three phases: The Hype Phase: This is when a new concept first garners widespread attention. During this phase, existing projects loosely related to the concept, smaller new projects, and related meme coins often see price increases of tens or even hundreds of percentage points. If the concept successfully transitions to the next phase, its price may remain stable, but in most cases, it collapses within weeks or months, and the associated project disappears. The Infrastructure Phase: Once a new concept's potential and relevance are proven, developers begin building meaningful products based on it. Product development takes a long time—anywhere from a few months to over a year—so vague or unsubstantiated concepts often die during this phase. However, if the concept truly possesses value, it will maintain steady attention during this stage, create real-world use cases, and gradually drive growth across the entire sector.
Adoption Stage: If a concept makes it to this stage, congratulations! In the crypto industry, only a handful of concepts have successfully reached the Adoption Stage, such as automated market makers (AMMs), centralized limit order books (CLOBs), lending protocols, staking-related protocols, and stablecoins. Concepts at this stage have demonstrated product-market fit (PMF), leading to the continued emergence of new protocols and significant user engagement.
Case Studies in the Crypto Industry
So, what stage are the topics currently trending on Crypto Twitter (CT) at?
Futarchy: As mentioned above, Futarchy experienced a hype phase due to Vitalik's mention, but the hype subsequently waned. Recently, the topic entered a hype phase again with Solana's ICO. However, after just a few weeks, it quickly lost traction. This is because the future of governance involves extremely complex governance discussions, making it a concept that is difficult to achieve widespread adoption without multi-generational societal change. Decentralized energy: Decentralized energy entered a hype phase last year, with many companies receiving investment from top-tier venture capital firms. Recently, Daylight secured $75 million in funding from Framework and a16zcrypto, temporarily sparking renewed hype. However, market interest failed to sustain. This is because, as a field requiring physical infrastructure, the infrastructure phase of decentralized energy is inherently long. Robotics: Robotics follows a similar pattern. Amidst the growing interest in the integration of crypto and artificial intelligence (AI), Openmind, a crypto-robotics project, raised $20 million from Pantera and other institutions, igniting market interest in the robotics field. This has led to a surge in the prices of many small and medium-sized projects and meme coins, but widespread adoption is still a long way off. However, given the enormous potential of the crypto-robotics integration, many developers, including Openmind, are actively developing related products. These examples demonstrate that the path from the emergence of new concepts in the crypto industry to widespread adoption appears to be extremely difficult. However, a concept called x402, which has recently been gaining traction on crypto Twitter, appears poised for rapid adoption. So, what exactly is x402 different? Will x402 succeed? x402 Overview x402 is an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase, designed to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to make payments and trade autonomously without human intervention. x402 allows AI agents to use stablecoins to pay for services across multiple blockchains, offering the benefits of instant settlement and eliminating the complexities of account creation, subscriptions, or API keys. Source: Coinbase HTTP 402 is a status code meaning "Payment Required," but it has long been largely unused. x402 leverages HTTP 402, so when an AI agent sends an API request, the server returns an HTTP 402 status code, indicating that payment is required. Upon receiving this response, the AI agent pays the required amount of stablecoin. The process works as follows:
When the AI agent attempts to access a paid service (such as a news article, API, or data), the server returns an HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. This response not only indicates "payment is required" but also includes information such as the payment method, payment amount, and recipient (wallet address).
Based on the information provided by the server, the AI agent generates a transaction for the specified amount, adds a digital signature, and sends it back to the server.
The server passes the payment information to a "facilitator," which verifies the payment and processes the transaction on the blockchain.
Once payment is complete, the server grants the AI agent access to the service.
The importance of x402 lies not only in providing a payment standard for AI agents. Because payments are made via a stablecoin on the blockchain, it enables previously unattainable micropayment capabilities, allowing AI agents to call APIs or payment services in real time based on usage. Furthermore, x402 allows human users to bypass complex processes like API key management or account creation and access content directly based on micropayments. 2.2 Hype Phase X402 was first launched in May 2025 and initially received limited attention. However, after being mentioned in a16zcrypto’s report “State of Crypto 2025: The year crypto went mainstream”, X402 began to gain significant attention. According to Gartner, the agent commerce market is projected to reach $30 trillion by 2030, and a16z notes that x402 could become the primary payment gateway for AI agents. The most obvious sign that x402 has entered its hype phase is the sharp rise in the prices of related tokens. For example, $VIRTUAL, a token that often reacts whenever the topic of AI agents resurfaces, saw a 40% increase in just two days. Other related tokens also saw significant price increases, as shown in the chart below. This makes x402 look like another typical crypto concept—empty, superficial, and driven solely by hype. Indeed, many new crypto concepts emerge in a similar way: sparking price surges for small projects and meme-coins before quickly disappearing. However, x402 differs from these other topics in several ways: The high relevance of the AI proxy payment theme: This concept holds significant significance not only within the crypto space but also within the broader AI industry, giving it significant potential. The active attention and adoption of numerous Web2 companies: These factors suggest that x402 may not remain in the hype phase for long, but is expected to quickly transition to the infrastructure phase. Currently, x402 is in both the hype and infrastructure phases. In fact, before x402 even entered the hype phase, many Web2 and Web3 companies had already begun building infrastructure for x402 and actively integrating it into their services. Therefore, it's more accurate to say that x402 began in the infrastructure phase. Interestingly, contrary to the typical crypto narrative, x402 has attracted the attention of many major Web2 tech companies, who are actively adopting the protocol. This straddling of the Web2 and Web3 boundaries makes x402 particularly unique in the crypto industry. Cloudflare, a company that provides internet infrastructure and security solutions, recently launched its "Agents SDK" service, which helps developers easily create and deploy AI agents, and "Workers AI," an environment for running AI model inference. Cloudflare co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase and is very active in the x402 ecosystem. Cloudflare supports x402 in its "Agents SDK" service, enabling AI agents to easily make online payments. Notably, Cloudflare recently launched a US dollar stablecoin called NET Dollar, designed specifically for AI agents. AI agents built with the "Agents SDK" are expected to use x402 and NET Dollar for agent commerce. Vercel is a cloud platform company designed to help developers quickly build and deploy web applications. Vercel recently launched services such as the Vercel AI SDK and Vercel MCP, enabling developers to easily build and deploy AI agents and access projects through MCP. In September of this year, Vercel released x402-mcp, which allows AI agents to automatically process payments when accessing paid APIs or resources through MCP. Google Cloud previously launched the A2A protocol, which enables AI agents to communicate and collaborate with each other. The A2A protocol includes an extension, AP2 (Agentic Payments Protocol), which allows agents to complete payments autonomously. x402 is integrated into this system as the payment engine for AI agents to conduct actual transactions. Anthropic, a renowned artificial intelligence company, developed Claude LLM, which enables users to build AI agent services. Anthropic also launched an open-source standard protocol called MCP, which defines how AI models access external tools and data. Claude MCP supports x402, enabling Claude to automatically process payments when accessing paid MCP tools. Visa, the world's largest card payment network, recently announced the launch of the Trusted Agent Protocol, developed jointly by Visa and Cloudflare. This protocol verifies the trustworthiness of requests made by AI agents in commercial activities and supports payment processing via x402.
Others
According to Coinbase's announcement, other companies such as Circle and AWS are also collaborating with x402.
In addition to the companies and protocols adopting x402, a number of developer-friendly tools have recently emerged, such as x402scan. This exploration tool can visualize servers, transactions, and payment flows using x402, allowing users to see which services pass through which payment intermediaries and on which networks.
As the x402 ecosystem continues to expand, more companies and tools are expected to join, bringing further enrichment and development to the entire ecosystem.
Can x402 enter the stage of widespread adoption? 3.1 Challenges in Entering the Popularization Phase Source: x402scan Judging by the sharp rise in the price of related tokens and the adoption of x402 by numerous major companies, x402 appears to have entered the hype and infrastructure phase. However, whether x402 can achieve widespread adoption remains an open question. According to x402scan, approximately 55,000 buyers have sent 879,000 transactions to approximately 1,000 sellers. While these numbers may seem impressive, the total transaction volume was only approximately $923,000. This suggests that x402 still has a long way to go before it reaches widespread adoption. What conditions must x402 meet for it to reach widespread adoption? One of the most frequently cited factors is consumer psychology and trust structures. Even someone like me, writing about x402, can accept recommendations from AI agents in commerce but still hesitate to fully trust them with my funds. Even the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) can sometimes provide misinformation or suboptimal answers, and from a psychological perspective, it's difficult for consumers to trust AI agents based on these models to process payments. In fact, according to an Accenture survey of financial institutions, 87% of respondents cited customer distrust of AI payments as a problem, and 78% expressed concerns about AI bots making unauthorized payments or engaging in fraud. The second factor is the current state of enterprise infrastructure. According to Accenture, 85% of financial institutions report that their existing legacy systems are unsuitable for processing large-scale agent payments. In particular, the lack of systems to address fraudulent transactions in agent payments is a major barrier to entry. Overall, for x402 to reach widespread adoption, companies need to build systems optimized for agent commerce and cultivate consumer trust in these systems. However, both developing such infrastructure and shifting consumer mindset are time-consuming, so x402 may take longer than expected to reach widespread adoption. What does this mean for the blockchain industry? According to Gartner, by 2030, AI agents will influence $30 trillion in purchasing behavior. While the AI agent payment market is still in its early stages, it's encouraging that x402 appears to be establishing itself as the industry standard. This aligns with the fact that major IT companies like Google, Anthropic, and Cloudflare have adopted x402 for AI agent payments. So, what can the crypto market expect as x402 becomes more active? One highly likely prediction is that the recent surge in x402-related token prices may be unsustainable in the long term. Since the rise of the crypto and AI space, the concept has gradually evolved into a meaningful field, with the emergence of several new projects, but many of the smaller project tokens and meme tokens that soared during the initial hype have seen disappointing price performance over time. Source: x402scan A clear value-add that x402 brings to the blockchain industry is that all AI-agented payments will be conducted on blockchain networks. Currently, most transactions occur on the Base network, with some on Solana, but x402 is designed to be blockchain-agnostic, meaning it can be used on any network. This suggests that as the x402 ecosystem expands, payments will be conducted across multiple networks—not just Base and Solana, driven by demand and supply from buyers and sellers.
Agency commerce represents an inevitable and massive future market, and all payments will ultimately circulate on the blockchain through x402. This will mark the moment when blockchain finds its second global product-market fit (PMF) after stablecoins.
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