x402 Isn't Good Yet, Apify Says

Jan Curn told AI Engineer World Fair that x402 isn't good yet, despite the hype around HTTP 402.

Apify runs 45,000 tools called actors and pays its community more than $1 million per month. The company just 10x'd the x402 catalog by adding 20,000 actors with Coinbase.

Why x402 still breaks on real workloads

The scheme charges a fixed fee per call, which falls apart for Apify actors that run for seconds or hours under metered billing.

Coinbase promised an up-to-$5 cap to fix metering, but Curn said it still allows double spending until settlement is confirmed on chain.

That leaves providers in a bind: do the work before payment and risk not getting paid, or wait for settlement and risk a failed job after the client has already paid.

Standards collide before agents scale

The protocol requires HTTP 402 Payment Required as the first response, while MCP requires HTTP 401.

Vendors are now splitting hosts into x402.example.com and mcp.example.com, a pattern Curn called an anti-pattern that would be like running 20 Amazons for 20 different cards.

The field is crowded with L402, MasterCard Agent Pay, AP2 by Google, ACP by OpenAI and Stripe, and more. Yet Curn said x402 leads Stripe MPP by about 20x in transactions and volume.

What x402 signals for founders

Apify sidestepped host splits and metering hacks by launching agent.apify.com, an agent-facing interface that sells prepaid tokens via x402 and MPP before routing to its normal API and MCP.

It is one markdown file for agents, intentionally ugly, and it lets Apify iterate without breaking tens of thousands of existing API customers.

For builders, crypto rails solve card problems like microtransaction fees and buyer disputes, but agent identity is still missing, so one-way settlement remains the only safe model.

What is still unproven

Coinbase's new batch settlement uses an escrow deposit and off-chain vouchers for micropayments, then settles in batches to cut chain costs.

Apify has not shipped it yet, total x402 volume is still around $1 million per month, and Curn had to build a local wallet and QR flow for the demo.

Until batch settlement proves it can prevent double spending at scale, long-running agent jobs will need prepayment, trust, or refunds that double chain fees.