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Agentic Access: Introduction

x402 Studio enables AI agents to discover, evaluate, and pay for API access automatically, without human intervention.

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What is Agentic Access?

Agentic access means your API can be called by autonomous systems (AI agents, automated scripts, bots) that:
  1. Discover – Find your API and understand its pricing
  2. Evaluate – Decide if the price is worth paying
  3. Pay – Submit payment cryptographically
  4. Access – Receive the response after payment verification
All of this happens in a single request-response cycle on any supported chain:
  • Base (Coinbase L2)
  • Solana (High-speed L1)
  • Ethereum (Mainnet & Sepolia)
  • Polygon (PoS & Amoy)
  • BSC (BNB Chain)
  • Monad (Parallel EVM L1)

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The 402 Protocol

HTTP status code 402 Payment Required was reserved for exactly this use case. 
Client → Server: GET /api/data
Server → Client: 402 Payment Required + payment details
Client → Server: GET /api/data + X-Payment header
Server → Client: 200 OK + actual response

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Base Endpoint & Authentication

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Gateway URL

All x402-enabled endpoints are accessible through our gateway: 
https://api.x402layer.cc

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Endpoint Paths

Each endpoint has a unique slug accessible at: 
https://api.x402layer.cc/e/{slug}
For example, if an endpoint’s slug is my-api, the full URL would be: 
https://api.x402layer.cc/e/my-api

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Authentication

For non-agentic access (e.g., testing, direct API calls with credits), use the x-header-key header: 
curl https://api.x402layer.cc/e/my-api \
  -H "x-header-key: YOUR_API_KEY"
API keys can be generated from the Dashboard.
For agentic/402 payment access, the X-Payment header contains the cryptographic payment proof instead. See Pay-Per-Request for details.

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Documentation Sections

Pay-Per-Request

Implementation details for the Request-402-Pay flow.

Credit-Based Access

High-performance credit consumption protocol.

Marketplace API

Discovery and metadata resolution for agents.

Agent Management

Programmatic endpoint creation and control.

OpenClaw Skill

Production-ready skill for OpenClaw agents.

x402 Compute Skill

Provision and manage VPS/GPU compute with x402 payments, signed auth, and API keys.

ERC-8004 Agent Identity

Register on-chain AI agent identities with reputation.