Lightning Labs, the company behind Lightning Network developer tools, announced on Wednesday the launch of a dedicated website for the L402 protocol, positioning it as a payment infrastructure for AI agents in bitcoin. L402, the Lightning HTTP 402 protocol, enables native API endpoint billing for autonomous agents by reusing HTTP’s 402 status code. The mechanism relies on stateless verification: the server sends a WWW-Authenticate header containing a token and a Lightning invoice, the client pays the invoice then presents the token along with the payment preimage to access the endpoint. This launch comes as several firms, including Coinbase with its x402 protocol backed by Google, Stripe and Visa, develop payment tools for autonomous software agents.
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