"AI pays on its own"… SOON launches 'x402 social experiment'

High-performance SVM rollup SOON announced on the 7th that it is starting the 'x402 social experiment' project to test the economic autonomy of artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This experiment focuses on verifying a new form of market mechanism in which AI autonomously participates in economic activities and issues assets based on predictions.

SOON defined this project as "a three-part social experiment to prepare for an era of AI-driven value exchange." Based on the 'x402 protocol', by fully automating payments and asset issuance between AI agents, it aims to build an AI-native economic model that surpasses the limitations of human-centered economies.

The x402 protocol used in this experiment leverages the web standard status code 'HTTP 402 Payment Required' and is designed to process payments directly in internet environments. The technology was developed by Coinbase, and enables websites or applications to handle payment requests and responses without separate payment providers. It especially maximizes micropayment efficiency between AI agents, providing an environment that allows autonomous service exchange.

SOON combined this x402 structure with its ultra-high-speed blockchain infrastructure. It features transaction finality under 400 milliseconds (ms) and fees below 0.00001 dollars, removing bottlenecks in transactions between AI agents. SOON said, "The transaction frequency of AI agents will be overwhelmingly higher than that of humans," adding, "What is needed then is infrastructure that reduces speed and cost to the extreme."

The project's first phase, 'Chapter 1: Social experiment on asset issuance', is an attempt to fundamentally redesign the way assets are created. Participants pay USDC through the x402 payment protocol and predict market movements in 10-second intervals. If the prediction is correct, a token is issued; if incorrect, the paid USDC is added to a liquidity pool. When the pool's liquidity reaches a certain threshold, the asset is automatically issued on-chain.

SOON plans to expand the mechanisms found in this experiment into an 'AI-native launchpad' where AI directly issues and trades assets. In the second phase, it plans to deploy a 'Facilitator' that supports the x402 protocol to its payment engine 'soonBase', allowing AI agents to perform transactions directly. The third phase is scheduled to experiment with enabling AI to autonomously issue high-performance chains through x402 payments.

A SOON representative said, "Now that high-performance infrastructure is ready, what is left is the question of what kind of economy autonomous agents and communities will create," adding, "The x402 experiment will be a signal that opens the era of the AI economy."