x402

Agentic commerce compresses several payment markets into one label. For assisted retail shopping, card networks already provide consumer protections that stablecoin settlement does not replicate. The stronger case for stablecoins is narrower: autonomous digital procurement, where bounded agents buy small units of API access, data, or compute from suppliers discovered at runtime. In that machine-native market, x402-style handshakes, AP2 mandates, and stablecoin rails address different layers of the same problem.