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| Autori principali: | , , , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01179 |
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| _version_ | 1866914407946125312 |
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| author | Li, Yue Wang, Lei Wang, Kaixuan Yang, Zhiqiang Wang, Ke Guan, Zhi Gao, Jianbo |
| author_facet | Li, Yue Wang, Lei Wang, Kaixuan Yang, Zhiqiang Wang, Ke Guan, Zhi Gao, Jianbo |
| contents | The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents is driving a shift toward agentic commerce, where agents are expected to autonomously invoke and pay for services. While blockchain-based payments offer a programmable foundation for such interactions, the recently proposed x402 standard fails to enforce end-to-end atomicity across service execution, payment, and result delivery.
In this paper, we present A402, a trust-minimized payment architecture that securely binds cryptocurrency payments to service execution. A402 introduces Atomic Service Channels (ASCs), a new channel protocol that integrates service execution into payment channels, enabling real-time, high-frequency micropayments for agentic commerce. Within each ASC, A402 employs an atomic exchange protocol based on TEE-assisted adaptor signatures, ensuring that payments are finalized if and only if the requested service is correctly executed and the corresponding result is delivered. To further ensure privacy, A402 incorporates a TEE-based Liquidity Vault that privately manages the lifecycle of ASCs and aggregates their settlements into a single on-chain transaction, revealing only aggregated balances.
We implement A402 and evaluate it against x402 with integrations on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Our results show that A402 delivers orders-of-magnitude performance and on-chain cost improvements over x402 while providing trust-minimized security guarantees. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01179 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A402: Binding Cryptocurrency Payments to Service Execution for Agentic Commerce Li, Yue Wang, Lei Wang, Kaixuan Yang, Zhiqiang Wang, Ke Guan, Zhi Gao, Jianbo Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Cryptography and Security The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents is driving a shift toward agentic commerce, where agents are expected to autonomously invoke and pay for services. While blockchain-based payments offer a programmable foundation for such interactions, the recently proposed x402 standard fails to enforce end-to-end atomicity across service execution, payment, and result delivery. In this paper, we present A402, a trust-minimized payment architecture that securely binds cryptocurrency payments to service execution. A402 introduces Atomic Service Channels (ASCs), a new channel protocol that integrates service execution into payment channels, enabling real-time, high-frequency micropayments for agentic commerce. Within each ASC, A402 employs an atomic exchange protocol based on TEE-assisted adaptor signatures, ensuring that payments are finalized if and only if the requested service is correctly executed and the corresponding result is delivered. To further ensure privacy, A402 incorporates a TEE-based Liquidity Vault that privately manages the lifecycle of ASCs and aggregates their settlements into a single on-chain transaction, revealing only aggregated balances. We implement A402 and evaluate it against x402 with integrations on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Our results show that A402 delivers orders-of-magnitude performance and on-chain cost improvements over x402 while providing trust-minimized security guarantees. |
| title | A402: Binding Cryptocurrency Payments to Service Execution for Agentic Commerce |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01179 |