AMSTERDAM, Sept. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The x402 gateway is now settling real USDC on Base. Any API can charge for a single request, and the thing paying does not have to be a person.

X Pay is live on Base mainnet. From today the gateway settles real USDC, which means any HTTP endpoint on the internet can name a price, take payment and serve its response inside a single request. No account. No card. No API key. No subscription. No redirect to a checkout page.

That last part is the one that matters. Every payment system the web has ever had assumes a human at the end of it, somebody who can fill in a signup form, accept terms and type a card number. Software can do none of those things, and software is now the fastest growing buyer on the internet.

A door that stayed shut for thirty years

HTTP has carried a status code for payment since the early nineties. 402 Payment Required. It has sat in the specification ever since, marked reserved for future use, because the web had no way to move money fast enough or cheap enough to put behind it. Every other code in that range found a job. That one waited.

x402 is the standard that finally filled it, and it works now for a simple reason: stablecoins made a payment of a fifth of a cent economically real for the first time. The cost of moving the value finally fell below the value being moved.

X Pay is the gateway that turns that handshake into something a business can actually run. Quotes, verification, replay protection, receipts, payouts, a dashboard, and spending controls for the agents doing the buying.

What went live

  • Settlement in USDC on Base mainnet, chain id 8453.
  • The full x402 handshake in one round trip. The client asks, the server quotes, the client signs, the server serves.
  • Real cryptographic verification. Authorizations are EIP-3009, signed as EIP-712 typed data, recovered against the token contract domain and refused if they do not match the stated payer.
  • Atomic replay protection. An authorization can be spent exactly once, and the gateway proves that under concurrent load rather than assuming it.
  • The response is released before settlement completes, so a paid call is as fast as a free one. Nobody waits for a block.
  • A receipt on every payment, carrying the transaction hash, the payer and the fee split.
  • A merchant dashboard for revenue, endpoints, payouts, receipts and keys.

Pricing is 1% of settled volume. No monthly minimum, no setup fee, and nothing at all charged on a call that fails.

The buyer is software now

An agent that plans a trip, reconciles a ledger or researches a market does not make one large purchase. It makes thousands of tiny ones: a geocoding lookup, a currency conversion, a document parse, a model call. Each is worth a fraction of a cent, and a card network cannot clear any of them at a profit. The fixed cost of a card transaction is twenty to thirty cents. Selling a $0.002 API call on those rails loses money by two orders of magnitude.

So the whole internet learned to bundle. Subscriptions, tiers, prepaid credits, API keys with no ceiling on them. Every one of those is a workaround for a payment rail that cannot price small things, and every one of them either overcharges a light user or underserves a heavy one.

“For thirty years the web had a status code for payment and nothing behind it, so everyone built around the gap. Accounts, cards, subscriptions, API keys. Every one of those assumes a person with an email address and a wallet in their pocket. That assumption broke the day software became the buyer,” said Johnny Sluijmer, Chief Executive Officer of X Pay.

“We did not invent x402. Coinbase contributed it and the Linux Foundation runs it. What we built is the layer that turns the handshake into a business somebody can operate. As of today it moves real money.”

The wallet that says no

An x402 authorization is a signed commitment and there is no chargeback sitting behind it. Once an agent signs, the money is committed. So every control in the X Pay wallet runs before the signature exists, while refusing still costs nothing.

An operator mints a session key, which is the only credential an agent process ever needs to hold. That key carries a ceiling for a single call, a rolling budget across a window, a list of destinations it is allowed to pay, and a threshold above which a human has to approve. It expires on its own. Revoking it takes effect immediately and never requires moving funds or rotating a wallet.

Ask it to pay for something and it gives one of three answers: sign, ask a human, or refuse and name the limit that stopped it. An agent with a leaked session key can spend what that key was scoped to spend and not one unit more.

Built on the standard, not against it

x402 was contributed by Coinbase and has run under the Linux Foundation since 14 July 2026, with forty member organisations behind it. Seventeen are premier members, among them Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, Circle and Shopify.

The adoption is why X Pay built here rather than inventing a rail of its own. In its first year the protocol carried over 169 million payments across roughly 590,000 buyers and 100,000 sellers, running at about $600 million annualised as of March 2026. Base settles around 85% of that, which is precisely where X Pay went live.

X Pay does not compete with the standard. It sits on top of it and does the part the standard deliberately leaves open: giving a merchant a gateway, a dashboard, a wallet with real limits, payouts, and somewhere to be discovered.

Backing and partners

X Pay is backed by Credit Scend and EU Capital.Skyland Ventures

The company works with DeepBook AI on payments for its AI browser, AgentKey on programmatic access for agents, AIShare, AIAuction. Ecosystem partners include Dubai Blockchain Lab, The Crypto Launch, BigBull Capital and Skyland Ventures.

More than 24,000 people follow X Pay on Telegram. That audience is the first demand pool the marketplace draws on when it opens.

What comes next

The rest of 2026 brings session keys and spending limits into general release, and opens the marketplace, where an agent discovers an endpoint and pays for it in the same motion rather than being pointed at one by a human. Multichain settlement and routing follow in the first quarter of 2027. After that the same primitive goes wider: paywalls for sites, games and media, metering for IoT and robotics, and agents paying other agents.

“There are millions of APIs out there that have never been able to charge properly for what they do, because the smallest thing they can sell is worth less than the fee it would cost to sell it,” said Sluijmer. “We just handed them the till.

About X Pay

X Pay is a payment gateway for the x402 standard. It lets any API, agent or piece of software charge for a single HTTP request and settle in stablecoins, with no account, no API key and no subscription. X Pay is backed by Credit Scend and EU Capital Skyland Ventures. The company behind it is X-Pay Technologies, registered in the Netherlands, KVK 42149086.

Links

x-pay.llc   website and live gateway

@X_Pay_llc on X   announcements

t.me/xpaysllc   Telegram channel

t.me/xpay_llc   Telegram group

X-Pay Technologies on LinkedIn

Contact details:
Contact@x-pay.llc

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