Introducing 402Pay: BitGPT’s Native HTTP 402 Payment Stack for the Autonomous AI Economy

When introducing the BitGPT Network last year, we envisioned a decentralized ecosystem where specialized AI agents seamlessly collaborate, securely transact, and continuously self-improve—all powered by privacy-preserving inference and fine-tuning. In the months that followed, we worked more closely than ever with other developers, AI-framework leaders, and SaaS innovators than ever before. Along the way, we discovered a critical roadblock to our vision:

“Before I focus on optimizing inference or fine-tuning, I first need a straightforward way to monetize my agent and enable agents to pay for resources they consume autonomously.” — AI entrepreneur

This insight—that the lack of a scalable payment solution for agents limits our potential users' ability to scale their own businesses—immediately clarified our next step: unlocking autonomous AI commerce through frictionless, machine-native payments.

“The currency for AI is crypto.” — CZ, Binance

The AI agent market is projected to surge from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030, with a 44.8% CAGR. GPU costs, meanwhile, are dropping by 30% annually.  With the adoption of agent frameworks accelerating, traditional payment methods have already become a bottleneck, unable to deliver on the demands of an autonomous economy..

Today, we're solving this bottleneck by launching 402Pay, BitGPT’s HTTP 402-native payment infrastructure—purpose-built to power the autonomous AI economy and accelerate our foundational vision.

Get started: www.402Pay.com

Autonomous Payments redesigned from First Principle

We placed programmable payments at the heart of BitGPT because they accomplish three crucial objectives:

1. Unlock Supply:
   The moment developers can charge fractions of a cent—like $0.0005 per token or $0.03 per image resize—every AI model, prompt-chain, or data transformation shifts from being purely a cost to becoming a revenue stream. Providers are then incentivized to offer richer, more valuable capabilities openly rather than keeping them behind closed dashboards.
2. Empower Demand:
   Agents capable of embedding signed micropayments into each request can dynamically build multi-step workflows—such as “summarize → translate → generate slides”—and automatically route tasks to the most cost-effective or fastest endpoint, without the friction of human checkouts.
3. Ignite the Optimization Flywheel:
   As usage increases, providers and developers naturally pursue better performance through distributed fine-tuning and federated learning. These improvements become impactful precisely because they are driven by real economic signals.

Without this payment loop, a decentralized compute grid risks becoming an underused utility. With it, every GPU cycle and kilobyte of data carries clear value, connecting buyers and sellers transparently.

Leveraging HTTP 402 ("Payment Required")

HTTP 402 was originally reserved precisely for payment scenarios like ours but never standardized—until now.

A single HTTP header can now transform API requests into secure, paid interactions. Agents can receive deterministic receipts, transactions settle instantly on-chain, and users never have to manually manage payments.

We adopted HTTP 402 ("Payment Required") because it's the web’s native standard designed specifically for frictionless machine-to-machine payments. HTTP 402 enables autonomous AI agents to directly pay for APIs, compute resources, and data simply by sending standard HTTP requests—no complex integrations, account setups, or manual checkouts required. This protocol effortlessly scales to billions of sub-cent microtransactions, unlocking a previously impossible economic layer for AI-native commerce.

With HTTP 402 at its core, BitGPT empowers AI agents to autonomously transact at web scale, accelerating the transition toward a truly decentralized AI economy.

Introducing 402Pay: The Native HTTP 402 Payment Stack for AI Agents

BitGPT Payments comes as an integrated suite:

• Creator Console:
  Easily wrap APIs and define precise pricing, such as “up to $0.0005 per token,” “exact $0.10 per classification,” or “stream $0.01 per minute”—with instant analytics and automated payouts.
• Lightweight SDK:
  Transform any existing function into a payable resource with just a single decorator or middleware integration.
• Relay Infrastructure:
  Automatically verifies usage and settles payments on-chain without requiring developers to manage private keys or blockchain infrastructure directly.
• Embedded Wallet & Quota Manager:
  Allows AI agents to manage budgets and authorize spending seamlessly within their workflows.

Each transaction thus becomes atomic—payment, compute, and response happen within a single HTTP request, making payments a native, frictionless capability for autonomous agents, rather than a retrofitted human checkout process.

402Pay Stands Apart

Unlike traditional payment providers such as Stripe or PayPal, which impose high fees (1.5–4.35%) and lack support for autonomous agent-to-agent transactions, BitGPT is purpose-built for AI-native commerce. Existing blockchain solutions, such as Ethereum, lack direct HTTP 402 integration, while AI platforms like OpenAI remain siloed, lacking built-in payment orchestration. BitGPT uniquely fills this critical gap, enabling frictionless, sub-cent microtransactions at just 0.25% fees, with native HTTP 402 support and seamless interoperability.

This infrastructure unlocks billions of previously unfeasible microservices—like $0.03 image resizing or $0.0005 per-token inference, empowering developers and autonomous AI agents alike to monetize, discover, and consume services instantly and economically, setting the new standard in autonomous AI payments.

From Payments to Full Network

Integrating payments isn’t a deviation from our original goal—it accelerates it. Immediate revenue streams attract service providers, making distributed storage, compute, and model checkpoint infrastructure viable. Reliable agent-to-agent payments allow AI systems to autonomously retrain, delegate tasks, and assemble complex workflows, paving the way for the collective intelligence envisioned in BitGPT’s original design.

Our roadmap unfolds in three clear phases, each defined by concrete milestones:

• Commerce Enablement: Launch BitGPT Payments, achieving widespread adoption. Milestone: 100 active providers by H1 2025.
• Data & Compute Mesh: Transition services onto decentralized storage and secure blind-training protocols. Milestone: 1 PB decentralized data; 10K GPU nodes active.
• Autonomous Intelligence Layer: Empower agents to autonomously manage model improvement, data acquisition, and workflow optimization. Milestone: Over 50% autonomous traffic by 2026.

Igniting Our Privacy-Preserving AI Vision with Payments

BitGPT’s foundational mission—delivering decentralized, privacy-preserving AI driven by secure Small Language Models (SLMs)—is now accelerating thanks to the launch of BitGPT Payments. BitGPT Payments uniquely aligns frictionless micropayments directly with secure SLM distillation, creating immediate economic incentives that drive both adoption and innovation.

Today, BitGPT Payments is live in developer preview. Early adopters are already reporting that they've turned costs into profitable services, and our integrated analytics make it easy to track monetization and adoption. We invite developers, enterprises, researchers, and forward-thinking investors to join us now, shaping the economic foundations of decentralized AI and positioning themselves ahead of this transformative wave.

We invite you to try 402Pay for yourself: http://402pay.com

Hop on our Discord Channel to learn more: http://bitgpt.xyz/discord

Disclaimer: Press release sponsored by our commercial partners.