Sign in Subscribe

Agentic Commerce and x402 - Why Bitcoin is missing ?

In May, 2025 Coinbase and its partners introduced x402 - a payment protocol that enables instant stablecoin payments directly over HTTP.  The protocol is supposed to be Blockchain agnostic but currently only supports EVM compatible networks like Base and Solana. In September 2025, Google launches Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with 20+ partners that include Paypal, Revolut, Accenture, PwC, Salesforce among others.  A2A-x402 is released,  developed  jointly by Coinbase, Ethereum Foundation, and MetaMask to natively support stablecoin and crypto payments. Fast forward to 2026,  total transaction volume processed by x402 facilitators has now surpassed $26.19M  . We have seen adoption from cloudfare, firecrawl, pinata and other web services. However,  one obvious question remains:

Why the largest cryptocurrency  - Bitcoin (58% crypto market share)  is missing in agentic commerce ?

We do research to understand the reasons behind this

  1. USDC/Coinbase and AI hegemony - USDC is issued by Circle Internet Financial which is a banking institution. USDC is controlled and easily blocked by Circle. We also detail here on the motivation behind AI companies like OpenAI / Google to dominate agentic commerce. It makes sense for these institutions to have agentic commerce run on payment methods like credit cards, paypal, USDC which can be centrally controlled / regulated.
  2. Stable value - Volatility of bitcoin is brought forward as a counter argument for its adoption. However, bitcoin remains the dominant  crypto in e-commerce, accounting for more than 84% of Bitpay's transactions. Stable coins are known to be essentially unstable and risky that has been proven by collapse of TerraUSD (USDT).
  3. Zero Fee - In X402 , the user pays zero fee. Use signs EIP-3009 -  transfer with authorization. This enables the facilitator to pay the gas fee. Now we all know there is no free lunch (TANSTAAFL). While the facilitator is paying your fee they extract it back by selling/controlling your data.
  4. Block confirmation times - The 10 minute block confirmation time is put forward as a hindrance to instant e-commerce. While it is true that confirmation times stifles instance e-commerce, most practical e-commerce transactions are not instant. Seller will pack goods, and send them to delivery after a few days. For digital goods like airplane tickets, delivery via email is acceptable to customers. We also detail below how agentic workflow can accommodate and in fact aid bitcoin payment flow

x402b - A Bitcoin Version

An agentic flow using bitcoin payments

Above we have shown a plausible protocol that modifies x402 to accommodate the asynchronous nature of bitcoin payment confirmations .

  1. Resource Requested (HTTP 402 Payment Required) - Clients makes a request at the resource endpoint. Merchant server creates a request for a new order to the facilitator. Client receives the following:
    i. Orderid: Unique order id to track the order (3016-734428-7759)
    ii. BTCAddress: Unique bitcoin address to make payment for the order (bc1qv4z0zmh3gtq3u8ld8rpfqqgczjealmqd6pl5r7)
    iii. Facilitator SSE endpoint url: This is a URL that client can use to keep track of the payment confirmation(https://blockapipoint.com/notify_confirm)
    iv. BTC amount x: This is the bitcoin amount to be paid for fufilling the order. The faciltator locks bitcoin price for a small time period (around 10 min) so that clients can pay for the order  
  2. Client makes payment - The agent pays bitcoin to the unique bitcoin address and recieves a bitcoin transaction id
  3. Client waits for payment confirmation - Agent can monitor the blockchain network itself for the transaction confirmation or it can optionally use the faciltator SSE URL to get notification
  4. Resource Delivered - Bitcoin block is mined and transaction confirms. Merchant gets HTTP callback to notify of the order confirmation. Agent now re-requests the resource from server quoting the unique order id and sucessfully gets the resource !

Is agentic commerce useful for bitcoiners?

Most bitcoin users are privacy aware and understand web security and technicals.  In trying to implement bitcoin support for agentic commerce, we ask


Are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Below we show few practical scenarios on how agents can help bitcoiners accelerate their ecommerce workflow:

Auto purchase VPN service

AI agentic can automatically purchase your VPN for you

Renew  domains

AI agent can auto renew domains that are about to expire

Setup a Self Hosted Wordpress Blog

Imagine you need to setup a wordpress blog on new domain ai2030.com. This involves the following tasks:

  1. Purchase hosting server for the indicated cost ~ 10USD per month
  2. Install latest wordpress on the hosting server and check if running properly
  3. Purchase domain ai2030.com
  4. Point domain records to hosting server
  5. Wait for DNS propagation changes
  6. Install wordpress plugins to optimize site security and SEO
  7. Install postfix server for mail
  8. Test mail / blog functionality

The whole process manually can take 1-2 days. It contains asynchronous tasks like DNS propagation that require you to sometimes wait 1-2 hours. Also install is not always smooth and problem debugging takes time depending  on your technical expertise and familiarity. The process can however be offloaded to AI agents which can potentially do everything while you sleep !

Subscriptions

Perhaps the most useful workflow enhancement is that of  SAAS service subscriptions. Subscriptions are not natively possible in bitcoin. Websites offering bitcoin payments have worked around this by offering a prepaid 3/6month  plan. However, this still creates a friction for users who have to frequently top up their services

Agentic Dashboard managing user subscriptions

The SAAS service provides the subscription period and amount to the agent on order confirmation. The agent can keep track of the payment due dates and automatically do bitcoin payment when required. This saves the users lots of time / effort keep track of subscription in email and paying them each month

Security of agentic payments

Lots of users are rightly worried about giving agents access to payments. Giving an agent credit card numbers / stripe api keys can be a recipe to a situation culminating in draining your complete bank account! However, giving agentic access to a sandboxed crypto wallet with small amount (<100USD) is a good compromise. The wallet can be encrypted manually requiring password from user each time payment tx are signed. Payments via lightning network can be auto approved to pay for microservices

We pondered the reasons of exclusion of bitcoin in the evolving agentic commerce ecosystem. We also put forward a modified x402 protocol that works with bitcoin payments and  debate the utility of agents for bitcoin users

Comments ()