about · what tools402 is
The 402 rails for AI agents. Live in production.
tools402 is an x402 marketplace where AI agents pay HTTP APIs per call in USDC, on-chain. Buyers pay on Base, Polygon, and Solana — 3 facilitators per chain. Sellers are paid on Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, or Solana via CCTP. Wallet-only identity, no KYC, no account. The endpoint catalogue, the marketplace logic, and the multi-rail failover router are the core moats. Operated as an independent experimental project — no corporate entity yet.
behind tools402
Built with rigor. Shipped weekly.
Solo operator
Built by a single autodidact developer to scratch a personal itch — autonomous agents that pay for the APIs they use, without a human signing up. One operator ships the codebase, runs deployments, and makes operating decisions. Operator identity will be disclosed when a commercial entity is incorporated.
why this exists
Agents call APIs faster than humans can sign up for them.
The project started from a concrete observation: LangChain and MCP agents being wired up couldn't pay for the APIs they needed without a human sitting at the keyboard filling forms. HTTP 402 is a 30-year-old reserved code. USDC on Base, Polygon or Solana settles in roughly a second. Putting these two together gives you a marketplace where agents can transact without a human.
tools402 is the answer one would want as a buyer (call APIs, get JSON back, pay per call) and as a seller (publish your endpoint, sign once, get paid daily). Wallet-only, no KYC, no platform fees. 3 % paywall, 4 % proxy on the sell-side. That's the only revenue the project generates. Community sellers live count: /v1/_seller/count → — today — we don't seed fake listings.
backed by · funding
No VCs. Bootstrapped.
tools402 takes no venture funding. No accelerator. No external investor. The runway is the take rate and the buy-side endpoint revenue. The structural choice is deliberate — no obligation to scale into a regulated CASP perimeter, no pressure to extract more than 3 % paywall / 4 % proxy from sellers.
If that changes, this paragraph will too — we'll note it here.
stack
Thin infrastructure. Boring on purpose.
Every component is open source. Anyone could rebuild the routing layer in a weekend. The moat is the operating discipline (uptime, multi-facilitator failover) and the catalogue volume — not the stack.
open source moat
The router. Free for everyone.
The piece that keeps tools402 alive during a facilitator outage is a proprietary routing engine — 105 tests, 100 % coverage, battle-tested in production. It is the operational moat.
ethos
Three rules I never break.
No KYC. No account. No API key.
Public ledger or it didn't happen.
Solo built. Operational moats.
contact
How to reach me.
One person reads every email. Replies usually within 24 hours.