Cardano has joined the x402 payment standard through an official SDK integration, allowing applications and AI agents to pay for API calls and other online services using ADA or Cardano native tokens.
The rollout puts the network alongside Solana and XRP Ledger in the emerging market for automated internet payments, while ADA’s price has climbed about 6% in 24 hours.
Cardano Adds x402 Support for AI Agent Payments
The Cardano Foundation announced on September 21 that the x402 integration was available through npm, giving developers a way to build applications and AI agents that send and receive ADA or Cardano native tokens over HTTP.
The integration makes Cardano part of the official x402 SDK, allowing an application or agent to pay for an API request without creating an account, obtaining an API key, or using a checkout page.
According to the foundation, Cardano’s specification was merged in June. Its engineers subsequently developed the client, server, and facilitator components. Working with the Masumi Network team, they also added Masumi as a transfer method and completed a three-month review.
Developers can install the package using npm install @x402/cardano. The demo and facilitator are open source, and TypeScript is the first supported language, with Python support planned next.
The x42 standard uses HTTP’s existing “402 Payment Required” status code to initiate payments. When a request arrives without payment, a server can return a 402 response, prompting the client to pay and retry.
ADA Rises as x402 Adoption Expands
Cardano’s jump onto the x402 bandwagon follows Ripple’s joining of the Linux Foundation-hosted x402 Foundation in July, alongside other companies working on the protocol, including Coinbase and Circle. The XRP Ledger already supports x402, with XRP and RLUSD available for agent transactions.
However, in August, analyst Jamie Coutts measured x402 settlement volume as down 93% from the beginning of the year to that point, with its seven-day average having fallen to around $41,800, despite continued development of infrastructure for automated payments.
But at the time of writing, the x402 website reported 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume over the previous 30 days, with 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers.
ADA, meanwhile, was trading around $0.24, up nearly 6% in 24 hours and over 20% in the last seven days, as the broader crypto sector turned green, with several large altcoins marking huge gains, including XRP (6.8%), SOL (4.9%), and DOGE (13.5%).
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