AEON, a graduate of BNB Chain's Most Valuable Builder (MVB) Season 10 program, launched its x402 Facilitator on the BNB Chain on October 30, 2025, bringing Coinbase's AI payment protocol to the ecosystem. The x402 protocol leverages the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code to enable AI agents to execute transactions autonomously without human intervention, addressing technical hurdles like the lack of EIP-3009 support for gasless transactions on major stablecoins.
AEON's facilitator validates payment payloads for authenticity and compliance before confirming transactions, supporting both EIP-3009-enabled tokens and standard ERC-20 tokens. Each transaction generates an immutable receipt under ERC-8004, assigning a unique identifier to AI agents. Adoption has surged, with weekly agent-to-agent transactions rising from under 5,000 to over 25,000 in the week starting October 19. Circle's integration in September allowed AI agents to pay for API services using USDC through Developer-Controlled Wallets.
The market response has been positive; for instance, Virtuals Protocol's VIRTUAL token saw a nearly 100% price increase in four days after its x402 integration on October 27. BNB Chain promoted several x402-related projects, including AEON, Unibase, pieverse, and TermiX AI, on October 28. AEON, which processes over $30 million monthly and is raising $60 million to expand to 100 million merchants, aligns with broader trends, such as Wirex's forecast of a €1 trillion European stablecoin market by 2030 driven by agentic payments.
Coinbase published the x402 whitepaper on May 6, outlining it as an open standard for internet-native payments. Trackers indicate x402-powered transactions now total over 3.1 million, generating more than $3.5 million in volume, with over 162,000 buyers and 30,000 sellers. The protocol is backed by industry leaders like Cloudflare and Google, with projections from a16z Crypto suggesting autonomous transactions could reach $30 trillion by 2030, potentially restructuring internet business models.
