- Coinbase's Lincoln Murr said x402 payments between machines are growing fast overall. He also said AWS and Cloudflare now offer x402 gating for websites.
- On that gating, he said adoption has not been very strong yet. The tools exist, but whether publishers get paid is still unproven.
A payment layer for machines only helps the web if money reaches the people who make the content. Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, made that case on the AI Engineer show. He split the picture in two: x402 use overall is strong, but publisher gating has not caught on yet.
What was said
x402 is Coinbase's standard for internet data payments. It builds on HTTP 402, a web code meant for "payment required" that went unused for decades. Put simply, a site can send that reply instead of a page, and an agent that pays can then be let in.
Overall use, the speaker said, has beaten Coinbase's own expectations. He cited tens of millions in volume and hundreds of millions of transactions every 30 days. Those figures cover agent payments in general.
The publisher case is narrower. He said people now use chat tools and Google's AI overviews instead of visiting sites. He added that bot traffic has passed human traffic for the first time. A speaker on the show described the result: "It feels a little bit like we're in the LimeWire era of the internet, where you can scrape all this content for completely free".
His answer is a tiny fee for agents. He gave one ten-thousandth of a cent as an example. He said AWS and Cloudflare, which he put at roughly 40% of internet traffic together, have both enabled x402 gating. Then came the concession: it "hasn't seen very strong adoption just yet".
Why it matters
Our reading: the tooling is ahead of the demand. A site on either network can switch on paid access, yet few appear to have done so. Nothing in the talk shows publishers earning real money from it.
That leaves three questions for anyone running a site or buying agents. If you publish, do you gate, or keep content free for agents? If you run agents, what would paid access add to your costs? And who pays the fee in the end?
The other side
Murr works for the company behind x402, so he has a stake in its success. His view that this shift is inevitable is an opinion, not evidence. The volumes he cited do not say how much money reaches publishers.
The price he gave was an illustration, not a reported rate. He also said the fee should be hidden from users, much like an AI subscription. He did not say who ends up paying it. The talk leaves open whether sites will gate their content, and whether agents will pay.
Written by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance, and checked by our editorial review: every quotation was verified against the recording's transcript. How we use AI.
The conversation this talking point comes from
- AI Engineer: Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase (2026-10-20)
