P402 Router

P402 Router is a specialized infrastructure layer designed to bridge the gap between autonomous AI agents and paid web services. By sitting between paid endpoints and facilitators, it enables machines to negotiate, verify, and settle transactions using the x402 standard.

This platform addresses the core challenges of the agentic economy: fragmented payment standards, uncontrolled API spend, and the limitations of traditional credit card subscriptions. It provides a decentralized control plane where you can define policies, route requests by intent, and settle payments instantly on the Base L2 network.

Key Features

• 🎯 Intent-Based Dynamic Routing: Automatically select the optimal path for every request based on real-time provider health, cost, and latency. This ensures your agents always use the most efficient and reliable service available without manual intervention.
• 🛡️ Cryptographic Policy Enforcement: Define strict spend caps and access rules at the edge. By enforcing budgets cryptographically, you prevent "runaway loops" where a bug in an agent's code could otherwise drain a wallet in seconds.
• 🔗 Trustless USDC Settlement: Leverage EIP-3009 compliant USDC transfers on the Base network for near-instant settlement. The router handles the complex negotiation of HTTP 402 "Payment Required" challenges, ensuring sellers receive funds securely and buyers get immediate access.
• 📈 Real-Time Decision Tracing: Gain full observability into every payment attempt with a detailed timeline. Each trace includes the initial plan, signature verification, and settlement event, allowing you to debug failed calls or audit spending with precision.
• 🌐 Bazaar Auto-Discovery: Automatically publish machine-readable metadata to the Bazaar discovery layer. This allows other agents and developers to find your services, view real-time health signals, and understand pricing structures dynamically.

Use Cases

• Self-Healing Data Pipelines: When an agent hits a rate limit (HTTP 429) on a free-tier API, the P402 Router can automatically detect an alternative paid endpoint. The agent settles the micro-transaction instantly, maintaining 100% uptime for critical data flows.
• Autonomous Research & Trading: AI agents can "buy" high-fidelity market intelligence or news on-demand. Instead of maintaining dozens of monthly subscriptions, the agent pays only for the specific data points required to validate a trade or generate a report.
• Internal Service Chargebacks: Large organizations can use P402 to manage resource allocation between departments. By placing paid edges between internal services, teams can meter usage and settle costs programmatically using a unified protocol.

Why Choose P402 Router?

P402 Router is built specifically for the "wallets, not credit cards" paradigm. While traditional payment gateways are designed for human-facing checkouts, this infrastructure is optimized for high-frequency, machine-to-machine interactions.

• Performance: Achieve sub-100ms latency for request routing and 99.99% uptime for mission-critical agent stacks.
• Security: Maintain a non-custodial environment where buyer keys never leave your infrastructure; the Router only verifies signatures and facilitates the on-chain settlement.
• Scalability: Move away from static adapters. The x402 standard allows you to wrap any API in minutes, providing a universal interface for monetization without custom integration code.

Conclusion

P402 Router provides the essential plumbing for a future where software pays for its own resources. By standardizing how AI agents discover and pay for services, it replaces the friction of manual subscriptions with the efficiency of autonomous, pay-per-call settlement. As you scale your agentic workflows, P402 ensures your infrastructure remains cost-controlled, resilient, and ready for production.