Coinbase’s x402 Has a Problem

Everyone’s talking about AI agents and Coinbase’s new x402 protocol for machine payments.

But what happens when those agents start paying each other millions of times per day?

Imagine a weather API that charges 1¢ per call.

With x402, that weather API can send a 402 Payment Required HTTP response when your bot calls it.

Your AI agent automatically pays $0.01 in USDC, retries, then gets the data.

This is what makes Coinbase’s x402 so useful.

Now imagine billions of AI agents pinging billions of APIs every second.

Every micro-payment costs gas + network fees… At that scale, capital burn becomes a wall.

This is partially why the low fee payment coins are pumping.

AI agents can’t send 0.01¢, 1,000,000,000 times a day, unless they are using a payment rail with zero, or near zero, fees, and sub 1s transaction times.

In the weather example: Ai agents hit the API, get the “402 Payment Required”, send 0.0001 of a crypto, then data is unlocked.

Today, x402 relies on stablecoins like USDC, which are fee-heavy and SLOW.

When AI agents transact at machine scale: Fees, gas, and slow tx times will be crippling.

If you’re wondering where adoption is headed, I would be looking for the absolute fastest and lowest fee crypto.