I think the purpose is so that your agent can do things like buy airline tickets for you. Using x402 it doesn't have to go through a typical credit card checkout process, which might have a lot of safeguards that make sure there's an actual human on the other end (captchas, etc)

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cestith 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Airlines pretty much need to know their customers no matter how they get paid. Wouldn’t you just be moving that to another part of the process in that example?

	▲	tleyden5iwx 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		API clients can already easily identify the user during the authentication process. What’s currently “missing” is a way for an API client to pay a service via the API call “on the fly”, without having a credit card on file or some prior account balance. Maybe a better example is an image generation api. Your agent chooses one based on its research, and without any account or credit card on file, it buys you an image using a x402.