When Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN formalized the Hypertext Transfer Protocol in the early 1990s, they reserved HTTP status code 402 with the designation “Payment Required.” The 1996 HTTP/1.0 ...

Built on the long-unused HTTP 402 status code, x402 turns web requests into payment channels using stablecoins, particularly USDC, which Circle and Coinbase developed. This article explains x402, how ...

There is a line of code that has been part of the internet’s architecture since 1997, waiting for a reason to exist. HTTP status code 402—”Payment Required”—was included in the original web ...