AI agents can now pay APIs with USDC in 200 ms as Coinbase activates x402 Bazaar
Coinbase has launched x402 Bazaar for AI agent-powered x402 micropayments.
The catalog exposes a machine-readable index of companies that settle for pay-per-request USDC funds and is positioned as a discovery layer for agents and builders integrating the x402 protocol.
Coinbase says Bazaar is in early growth, and at the moment, it indexes endpoints that settle by means of its hosted facilitator.
x402 revives the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” standing code and a repeat-request move in which the shopper attaches a signed cost payload.
Coinbase’s hosted facilitator verifies and settles the cost, so sellers don’t want blockchain infrastructure, and the corporate states it expenses no facilitator charge for USDC on Base.
Per Coinbase’s docs, present community assist is USDC on Base mainnet and Base Sepolia, with further belongings on the roadmap. See the x402 overview, the facilitator documentation, and HTTP 402 background on MDN.
The whitepaper frames the economics round sub-second confirmations and negligible gasoline. It compares “x402 (on Base)” with a 200 millisecond settlement path and nominal gasoline far beneath one ten-thousandth of a greenback, contrasting card charges and batch settlement.
Bazaar’s checklist endpoint returns structured JSON for every useful resource, together with accepted asset, community, vacation spot tackle, and the utmost quantity required, expressed in the token’s atomic models.
The instance exhibits a maxAmountRequired of 200 for USDC on Base, equal to $0.000200 at 6-decimal precision, illustrating the system’s supposed value granularity for per-call funds.
On the execution path, Base’s Flashblocks function provides 200-millisecond preconfirmations that shorten the perceived affirmation time for interactive apps.
Once community latency is included, infrastructure suppliers report typical end-to-end acknowledgments nearer to 300–500 ms, whereas Base’s customary block time stays two seconds.
For metered APIs, this latency funds can make priced retries sensible with out degrading person expertise. See Base Flashblocks and a supplier explainer on Chainstack.
Under the hood, most present implementations depend on EIP-3009’s authorization-based transfers, which permit a shopper to signal an authorization that the facilitator submits on-chain.
Coinbase’s API exposes /confirm and /settle endpoints to course of these flows, and group libraries mirror the sample. For the usual, see EIP-3009, and for an instance implementation see this GitHub repository. For protocol code and contribution steerage, see the x402 GitHub repo.
Regulation opens door for digital cost infrastructure
The coverage backdrop now tilts towards clearer stablecoin guidelines in the United States. In July, Congress handed and the President signed the GENIUS Act, a federal framework for cost stablecoins that mandates full backing in money or short-term Treasuries and creates licensing and supervision.
Europe’s Markets in Crypto-assets regime already applies to e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens. The European Banking Authority has clarified that issuers should maintain the related authorization and has printed technical requirements, with transitional aid for some ART issuers however not for EMTs. That combine means any EU-facing x402 settlement in fiat-pegged tokens finally is determined by EMT compliance and supervision.
Macro context round demand is shifting as dollar-stablecoins scale. The market worth has roughly doubled in 18 months to close $280 billion, with projections reaching into the trillions underneath supportive coverage, and the IMF’s Finance & Development discusses how USD-backed stablecoins can affect Treasury demand and greenback primacy.
A easy vary illustrates how Bazaar may monetize agentic workloads if technical and regulatory items maintain.
Using the whitepaper’s minimal value level as a reference, costs between $0.001 and $0.01 per name throughout 100 to 1,000 listed endpoints and 100,000 to 10 million paid calls per day would indicate every day gross cost quantity of $100 to $100,000 on the low finish of adoption, scaling to $1,000,000 on the high finish.
Settlement prices and facilitator charges are the primary variables, and Coinbase states the facilitator provides zero charge on Base, leaving nominal gasoline as the constraint.
The commerce tie-in issues for distribution. Coinbase and Shopify announced USDC funds on Base inside Shopify Payments, and Shopify’s personal communications describe Base as a quick, low-cost community built-in at checkout.
If on-chain retail flows normalize in mainstream ecommerce, x402’s pay-per-use sample can lengthen from human checkout into machine-to-machine API consumption utilizing the identical stablecoin rails.
Open questions stay, Bazaar at the moment lists companies settling in USDC on Base, and Coinbase’s FAQ factors to extra chains and belongings later.
Final adoption will rely upon how rapidly builders checklist price-disclosed endpoints and whether or not Flashblocks-level latency interprets to dependable, low-variance cost acknowledgment at manufacturing scale.
For now, Bazaar’s discovery API is reside, the facilitator is fee-free on Base, and the coverage setting is firming round stablecoin settlement.
The put up AI agents can now pay APIs with USDC in 200 ms as Coinbase activates x402 Bazaar appeared first on CryptoSlate.
