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x402 is a protocol for paying for an HTTP request inside the request itself. A seller answers an unpaid request with 402 Payment Required and machine-readable payment terms. The buyer signs a payment authorization and retries with it attached, and the seller’s facilitator settles it on-chain. With Dakota, a hosted payment agent pays those 402s from a Dakota-custodied wallet. Your application forwards the seller’s terms, Dakota checks them against a budget your customer set and returns the signed payment header, and your application sends it to the seller. Nobody on your side holds a key.
Beta. x402 is in early access. Run it against the sandbox on Base Sepolia first.

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How it differs from the rest of Agentic Payments

The rest of Agentic Payments schedules payments to payees your customer named in advance. x402 turns that model around:

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The flow

The signature Dakota returns is an EIP-3009 TransferWithAuthorization: signed typed data, not a transaction. It costs the payer no gas, and the whole payment completes inside one HTTP round trip.

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Issuing a signature is spending money

Nothing downstream asks for approval. Whoever holds the signed authorization can settle it until it expires. That is why the x402 mandate is the control that matters, and why Dakota evaluates it and records a hold against the budget before any signature exists. A payment the mandate refuses is never signed. It is also why x402 spend never appears as a wallet transaction: the seller’s facilitator moves the money, not Dakota. The holds are the record of x402 spend. See budgets & holds.

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The x402 wallet

Each agent pays x402 from exactly one wallet, created when you enable x402 for the agent:
  • It can sign x402 payments and nothing else. Any attempt to send funds from it is refused. That keeps it a plain account, the kind every x402 facilitator accepts.
  • It is funded by transfer. Send USDC to its address on the network the agent pays on.
  • It is separate from the agent’s other wallets. It does not appear in the agent’s wallet_ids, and no x402 request takes a wallet id: the agent’s x402 wallet is the only one it pays x402 from.

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Objects

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What’s supported

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Next

Quickstart

Enable x402, fund the wallet, set a budget, and pay a 402.

Budgets & holds

Every mandate field, the payee policies, and how holds settle.