1997: HTTP 402 “Payment Required” gets reserved in the spec.
then nothing. for 28 years.
2025: x402 ships. the 28 year wait ends.
2026: 169M transactions. 600k agents. 100k sellers. Coinbase, Shopify, Stripe, Cloudflare, Google, AWS, Visa all building on it. now stewarded by the Linux Foundation.
happy birthday to the protocol that fixed the internet’s original sin: real money moving over real HTTP 🎂