x402, a new open payment standard introduced in 2025, has activated the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code to facilitate native machine-to-machine transactions. This innovative approach allows payment requests to be embedded directly into HTTP responses, enabling automatic settlements by clients, including bots and AI agents, without the need for traditional accounts or manual input. The standard is rapidly gaining adoption among major infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare and Google. In the past 30 days, x402 has processed 1.35 million transactions, amounting to $1.48 million in payments, highlighting its growing traction in the market.