The x402 Market Map

Early Innings of the Agentic Economy – Abdul Al Ali, Venture Investor, at Decasonic

We also published a live interactive version of our market map here. If you are building at this intersection, reach out to us at Decasonic: link.

Introduction

We are approaching an early tipping point for the future of the agentic-economy, powered by crypto rails. The past week has noted a significant emergence of interest in the x402 standard, an open protocol for internet-native payments. This is, in part due to the release of ‘a16z’s State of Crypto 2025’ report, where they highlighted the emergence of x402 as a potential payment standard for machine-to-machine payments and agent-driven commerce, with a potential volume enabled by the standard at $30T by 2030. We agree with the assessment of a16z, and have been monitoring x402 since May of this year. The protocol is built around the “HTTP 402 status code,” enabling users to pay for resources via API without registration, emails, OAuth, or complex integrations. This enables web services to receive and request stablecoin payments natively on-chain. Programmable micro-transactions are enabled, appealing to AI agents or humans to instantly pay for data, goods, resources, or services in USDC. The standard is primarily centered around the foundational setup of the agentic economy, enabling any service provider integrated with the standard to accept crypto payments. 

At Decasonic, we have been actively monitoring the growth of x402. The past week brought a tipping point, fueled by nearly 10,000% surge in October 2025 activity, alongside 500k payments in a single week facilitated and operated by the standard. Our Web3 x AI investments, in part stem from our core belief in the emergence of the agentic economy, with on-chain rails being used to facilitate millions of micro-transactions by agents, machines, and robots. In part through our Web3 x AI investments, we aim to accelerate the vision towards an agentic economy, enabled by crypto rails. 

x402 is in part, the result of the combined efforts of the contributors to the x402 foundation: Coinbase and Cloudflare, the main contributors behind the foundation. The rapid growth in awareness has also been accelerated on X and through developer workshops due to the efforts of Lincoln and Kevin. 

Core Value Proposition

The main value proposition for x402 centers on enabling an agentic, automated economy for AI agents. This is amplified by an appeal towards enabling micropayments with a high-frequency focus for agents with a no-human-in-the-loop value proposition. It really fundamentally transforms payments from credit-based payments to usage-based payments, enabling the acceleration of the agentic economy. This is, in part, what makes x402 incredibly powerful. However, it is also an area where we see potential for continued and accelerated growth enabled by projects leveraging and building on top of the standard.

x402 Market Map (2025)

Similar to our other market maps focused on Web3 x AI, we map the x402 Market Map based on our five-layer AI Stack. 

• X-Axis – AI standard layers: Compute → Data → Model → Interface → Application.

• Y-Axis – Target audiences: Web3 Natives, Developers, Users, and Mainstream Audiences.

Note - as with our other market maps, this is a continued iteration and is a rapidly evolving, dynamic landscape. The current state of the ecosystem is unlikely to be the same over the next few quarters and years to come. The current labels we have identified and attached to projects are evolving, are subjective, and reflect our own internal frameworks. Projects may disagree with the labels or mapping they are identified by. To date, we have identified 115+ projects building, integrating, or utilizing the x402 standard.

Source: Decasonic’s x402 Market Map

Stack Breakdown

In the case of x402, it is no surprise that Interfaces and Applications dominate the stack. Out of the 115 projects identified, 52 projects fall under Interfaces, and 38 projects under Applications. We identified 12 projects under the Model Layer, and 12 additional projects under the Data Layer. No compute layer exists to date from the landscape of projects surveyed, however - we do anticipate more full-stack solutions to be offered by projects building on x402. 

We expect the x402 ecosystem to exponentially grow, driven by institutional, enterprise, SMB, agentic, and retail adoption of x402 as a foundational protocol for the agentic economy. L1s working on offering solutions for agents are likely to integrate x402, given its core value proposition of enabling fast, frequent, micro-payment transactions for AI agents. As it currently stands, most of the projects identified fall under the label of 'Service Providers,' offering their resources, models, inference, and agents in return for payments on the x402 protocol. We believe the number of Service Providers will continue to accelerate. 

We also believe existing frameworks focused on enabling agentic payments, including ACP by Virtuals Protocol and the agents live on ACP will start to integrate x402 payments for their services. You will also note that many of the projects under the ‘Agents’ subcategory of Applications are Virtuals Protocol-launched agents. 

Growth

The growth of the standard has been significant. Data from x402scan points towards growth across the number of users, agents, total calls, and requests. The below snapshot notes the Past 30D in growth. The mindshare of x402 peaked over the past week, but we believe it is approaching a market tipping point. This is a signal of the foundation for the agentic economy being built out in real-time, and the market recognizes the value and the explosive growth offered. We believe, despite the growth, the adoption remains early. 

Our data analyst eugene66dj, built out a dashboard on Dune to showcase the growth of the Coinbase facilitator account on x402. We expect the growth in non-Coinbase, non-Base payment facilitators to continue to grow as x402 is adopted by wider protocols. 

1. $1.11M in Lifetime Value Moved, reflecting the cumulative value of the transactions on the x402 network.

2. 1.183M in Lifetime Transaction Count, reflecting the cumulative number of transactions on the network. 

  Source: Link

Vision

x402 is building the foundational rails for the agentic economy, transforming intents into on-chain actions through payments facilitated by an ecosystem of service providers and agents. We anticipate significant growth in both the Service Providers (primarily applications, interfaces) offering access to x402 payments for their services, but also growth in Client-side Integrations. The foundation outlines the requirement of adding a “single line of code in your app,” in order to start accepting USDC. This simple integration will accelerate the growth, and allow for increased integrations from Client-side Integrations. We believe over time, there will be hundreds of thousands if not millions of agents participating in the agentic economy. 

Opportunities for Growth

At its current stage, there are significant opportunities for growth in the x402 standard. Opportunities we see for projects to either adapt or integrate x402 includes:

1. Facilitators: Growth in payment facilitators offering cross-chain x402 payment offerings (including BSC, NEAR, Solana, others). 

2. Agent Reputation: Ensuring agents request and engage with verified service providers, whether in the form of SMBs, institutions, enterprises, or other agents. This also provides the option for agents to exclusively engage with other high-value, high-reputation agents. 

3. Discoverability: A layer for discoverability remains missing. There is potential for a discovery interface or application to emerge, allowing for humans and agents to discover other agents and service providers accepting x402 payments. This would allow a human user to provide an input/intent request to an agent with a given objective, with the agent sourcing the best provider for a given task to complete the objective. 

4. Verification: Enabling the verification of the quality of resources provided by service providers on the network. Part of enabling automation with no human-in-the-loop intervention is no cash-back. Therefore, an agent could pay for a resource but not receive the output requested. This potentially reflects negatively on the service provider, but there’s no opportunity to ‘reverse,’ the transactions. 

   1. A verification layer, therefore, would be necessary for continued adoption. 

5. Full-Stack Offering: Offering end-to-end enabled services of 1-5. 

Conclusion

x402 is establishing the foundational rails for the agentic economy. We at Decasonic have been investing at the forefront of Web3 x AI. We are focused on accelerating adoption at this intersection, by means of capital and value-add to founders. If you are building at this intersection, reach out to us. We are actively investing. 

The content of these blog posts is strictly for informational and educational purposes and is not intended as investment advice, or as a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any asset. Nothing herein should be considered legal or tax advice. You should consult your own professional advisor before making any financial decision. Decasonic makes no warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the content in these blog posts. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Decasonic. Decasonic disclaims liability for any errors or omissions in these blog posts and for any actions taken based on the information provided.