A402: Binding Cryptocurrency Payments to Service Execution for Agentic Commerce

TL;DR

A402 is a novel payment architecture that securely links cryptocurrency payments to service execution in autonomous AI agent interactions, ensuring atomicity, privacy, and high performance.

Contribution

It introduces Atomic Service Channels with TEE-assisted protocols and a privacy-preserving Liquidity Vault, enhancing trust, security, and efficiency over existing standards.

Findings

A402 achieves orders-of-magnitude performance improvements.

A402 reduces on-chain costs significantly.

A402 provides trust-minimized security guarantees.

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents is driving a shift toward agentic commerce, where agents are expected to autonomously invoke and pay for services. While blockchain-based payments offer a programmable foundation for such interactions, the recently proposed x402 standard fails to enforce end-to-end atomicity across service execution, payment, and result delivery. In this paper, we present A402, a trust-minimized payment architecture that securely binds cryptocurrency payments to service execution. A402 introduces Atomic Service Channels (ASCs), a new channel protocol that integrates service execution into payment channels, enabling real-time, high-frequency micropayments for agentic commerce. Within each ASC, A402 employs an atomic exchange protocol based on TEE-assisted adaptor signatures, ensuring that payments are finalized if and only if the requested service is correctly executed and the corresponding result is delivered. To further ensure privacy, A402 incorporates a TEE-based Liquidity Vault that privately manages the lifecycle of ASCs and aggregates their settlements into a single on-chain transaction, revealing only aggregated balances. We implement A402 and evaluate it against x402 with integrations on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Our results show that A402 delivers orders-of-magnitude performance and on-chain cost improvements over x402 while providing trust-minimized security guarantees.