Coinbase Moves x402 Protocol to Usage-Based Model for Agentic AI Tasks
One of the persistent friction points in agentic AI commerce has been a deceptively simple problem: you don’t always know how much a task will cost before you start it. Token-intensive LLM inference, variable-complexity queries, and dynamically-scoped compute jobs all have costs that only crystallize at completion. The x402 protocol — Coinbase’s open HTTP payment standard for AI agents — has until now required fixed, exact prices upfront. That made it great for deterministic APIs, but it structurally excluded an entire tier of usage-based services. ...