BUILT ON x402 · THE INTERNET'S PAYMENT STANDARD

The paywall your agent can pay.

Pico paywalls speak HTTP 402. Your agent hits a URL, gets back a structured price, signs once, retries with proof of payment. Same protocol Coinbase, Cloudflare, AWS, and Stripe are converging on. No API keys to manage, no per-vendor SDKs.

Get an agent account →See the code

Quickstart — two snippets

The first shows what your agent sees when it's built right. The second is the protocol underneath — a plain curl so you can see the price tag in JSON before writing any code.

@x402/fetch — Node or browser
import { wrapFetchWithPayment } from '@x402/fetch';
import { privateKeyToAccount } from 'viem/accounts';

// One agent wallet, one line of wrapper. Done.
const account = privateKeyToAccount(process.env.AGENT_PRIVATE_KEY);
const fetchWithPayment = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, account);

// Hit any Pico content URL — payment happens automatically on 402.
const res = await fetchWithPayment('https://picomicropay.nl/api/content/abc-123');
const { contentUrl, title } = await res.json();
curl — see the 402 challenge
# A bare curl shows you the 402 challenge — no signing required to peek.
$ curl -i https://picomicropay.nl/api/content/abc-123

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
payment-required: <base64 JSON, decoded below>

{
  "x402Version": 2,
  "accepts": [
    { "scheme": "exact", "network": "eip155:8453", "amount": "200000",
      "asset": "0x8335…2913", "payTo": "0xCreator…" },
    { "scheme": "exact", "network": "eip155:5042", "amount": "200000",
      "asset": "0x3600…0000", "payTo": "0xCreator…" }
  ]
}
# Base and Arc, same price, same creator wallet — your client picks one.

Pay on Arc

Every Pico paywall offers Arc mainnet, Circle's USDC-native chain, alongside Base in its 402 challenge. Register only eip155:5042 in your client (or add ?network=arc / an X-X402-Network: archeader to pin it) and you pay in Arc USDC. Circle's x402 Facilitator settles it in under a second, directly to the creator — Pico never holds the funds.

@x402/fetch — Arc mainnet
import { wrapFetchWithPayment, x402Client } from '@x402/fetch';
import { registerExactEvmScheme } from '@x402/evm/exact/client';
import { privateKeyToAccount } from 'viem/accounts';

// Same paywall, settled on Arc mainnet (eip155:5042) by Circle's
// x402 Facilitator. USDC goes straight to the creator's wallet.
const signer = privateKeyToAccount(process.env.AGENT_PRIVATE_KEY);
const client = registerExactEvmScheme(new x402Client(), {
  signer,
  networks: ['eip155:5042'],
});
const fetchWithPayment = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, client);

const res = await fetchWithPayment(
  'https://picomicropay.nl/api/content/abc-123?network=arc',
);
🤖 WHY AGENTS NEED THIS

API keys + monthly subscriptions are the old web.

  • No vendor signups. No dashboards to provision keys in. The wallet is the identity.
  • Per-request pricing. Pay 0.001 USDC per call. Charge 0.005 USDC per inference. Real microeconomics.
  • Cryptographic auth. The X-Payment header is a signed proof — no shared secrets to rotate.
  • Same protocol your data sources will adopt. Cloudflare, AWS, Stripe — all in. Build once, settle anywhere.
  • Composability. Your agent calls another agent which calls a Pico paywall — all via the same HTTP 402 handshake.

What developers are building

🔬
Research agents
Agents that read paywalled journalism, academic papers, and primary sources — auto-paying as they fetch.
📰
News aggregators
Backend pipelines that ingest premium articles for summarisation, with per-article costs passed through transparently.
🤝
AI assistants
End-user assistants that say 'I can read this for 20p — proceed?' instead of hitting a subscription wall.
📊
Data products
Tools that mine paywalled feeds with explicit, auditable per-record payment trails — perfect for compliance.
🧪
Evaluation harnesses
LLM evals that need consistent access to premium ground truth without expensive sub-licensing deals.
🌐
Browser extensions
User agents that auto-unlock at the publisher's price when the reader has agreed in advance.

What does it cost your agent?

The publisher sets the price. The protocol cost is the on-chain settlement on Base or Arc — sub-cent per call, and on Arc the facilitator pays it.

ScenarioPublisher priceSettlement costTotal per call
Read one article$0.20~$0.001~$0.201
Fetch one premium paper$1.50~$0.001~$1.501
100 research queries / day$0.05~$0.001$5.10/day
10,000 data pipeline calls / month$0.01~$0.001$110/month

Coming this quarter

🔑Q3
Per-agent API keys
📈Q3
Usage analytics
🪝Q4
Webhooks
🧪Q4
Sandbox mode

Start building today.

The endpoint is live now. No waitlist, no approval flow — sign up, get an agent account, paste the snippet, watch your agent pay.

Create agent accountdevelopers@pico.link
Listed in the x402 ecosystem
Listed on x402-list — 7-day uptime

Built on x402 · Settled on Base L2 · Coinbase Smart Wallet

© 2026 Pico Payments Ltd · Pico is a non-custodial software platform. Cryptoasset purchases are facilitated by Transak Pty Ltd (FCA #928910) and Ramp Network Limited (FCA #920097). Cryptoassets are high-risk, unregulated investments — you may lose all the money you invest.