Autonomous AI Will Be Ethereum’s Biggest Power User
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Autonomous agents — AI-powered programs that can think and transact without human input — may unlock a new world of e-commerce on Ethereum due to a largely forgotten HTTP web standard that has only recently been leveraged on the blockchain. The dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status — defined 30 years ago — together with Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3009, enables AI agents to make stablecoin transfers without human intervention, the Ethereum Foundation said on Wednesday, sharing a “guest thread” written by Coinbase development team members Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr. The pair said in the X post that autonomous agents may become Ethereum’s “biggest power user.” Coinbase has already implemented HTTP 402 via the “x402 payments protocol,” according to its GitHub account. Source: Ethereum Foundation The shift could be transformative because AI agents can now autonomously access funds to pay for services, eliminating the need for human intervention in managing API calls, storage or computation. It could enable everything from self-driving taxis covering their own costs to AI models generating content on demand and apps automatically using stablecoins to store data permanently, the pair said. Source: Ethereum Foundation In a limited manner, AI agents are already trading crypto by analyzing market data, executing buy or sell orders and optimizing portfolios in real time without human intervention. As simple as a vending machine Leffew and Murr compared the process to that of a vending machine, explaining that an AI agent receives an HTTP 402 request, signs a transaction, and makes the payment to get the response. Related: Tether and Rumble bet on AI with $1.17B Northern Data acquisition It essentially turns the API into a wallet-aware service, they said. “One round trip. Like a vending machine. No accounts required.” Ethereum is the best fit for HTTP 402 Leffew and Murr said…
Filed under: News - @ August 14, 2025 7:28 pm