The Internet Wasn't Built for Machines to Pay

We built the internet for humans. Browsers, buttons, billing forms. It assumes a person is on the other end.

But now AI agents are the ones browsing. Reading. Executing. And they can't enter their credit card into a checkout form. They need to call APIs. And those APIs need to get paid.

This is where things break.

The Subscription Trap

Most APIs charge monthly. $20/month. $99/month. $500/month. The model assumes you're a company with a billing department, running a predictable workload.

But an autonomous agent doesn't have "monthly." It has "right now." It needs to call this API, get this data, generate this image — once, immediately, and move on.

Subscriptions force agents into a human billing model that doesn't fit their usage pattern. Result: agents either overpay (subscribed to services they rarely use) or can't access services at all (no budget for the subscription).

The API Key Nightmare

To use 10 services, you need 10 API keys. Each key requires: an account, email verification, billing setup, rate limit management, key rotation, secret storage.

For a developer building one product? Annoying but manageable.

For an autonomous agent that needs to discover and use services dynamically? Impossible.

The agent can't create accounts. It can't fill out forms. It needs a wallet it can hold, and services that accept that wallet directly.

What Actually Works

The agent holds a wallet. The service publishes a price. The agent calls the service. The payment happens atomically — $0.001 for this request, settled instantly, no subscription, no account.

This is what x402 enables. HTTP payments. Service returns 402 Payment Required. Agent signs payment. Service delivers. Done.

No billing dashboard. No monthly invoice. No API key management. Just wallets paying for compute, per request, at internet speed.

The New Default

The agent economy needs new infrastructure. Not "traditional payments with a crypto wrapper." Native machine-to-machine commerce.

Wallet = identity. Request = payment. No humans required.

This is what we're building at BlockRun. The payment and discovery layer for agents that need to find, evaluate, and pay for services — autonomously.

The internet wasn't built for machines to pay. So we're building the layer that is.