Celo Core Co. has launched x402.celo.org, a native x402 facilitator for Celo, the leading programmable rails for global finance and one of the fastest-growing agentic ecosystems in crypto. Celo’s fast, low-cost infrastructure is well-positioned to support high-frequency agentic transactions, with an onchain economy of diverse global applications and infrastructure already handling real stablecoin payments, remittances, and commerce at scale.
As AI agents increasingly transact on behalf of humans across the crypto economy and broader internet, payments often create a critical blocker. Agents cannot sign up for accounts independently or own a credit card, limiting their ability to pay for API calls, inference, data, and content. x402 was developed to solve this: turning HTTP 402, a status code built into the web but never used, into an actual payment step.
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The introduction of Celo’s dedicated x402 facilitator extends early support launched by thirdweb, which enabled significant growth earlier this year, including the Celo Agent Visa program and previous agentic hackathons. Celo Core Co. now runs its own facilitator alongside thirdweb’s, bringing settlement in-house with a non-custodial solution as agent activity across the network scales at increasing rates.
The launch follows the significant growth of agents built on Celo, including Toppa, the top-ranked agent on 8004scan’s leaderboard, which settles phone top-ups, bill payments, and gift card purchases. The 73 participants in Celo Core Co.’s Onchain Agent hackathon last month drove 25,000 transactions, with additional support, mentorship, and bounties for developers available through the Agentic Payments and DeFAI Hackathon, which began last week. During the hackathon, builders are among the first to use Celo-native x402 with a dedicated track, in addition to a focus on paid MCP servers, metered inference, and agent-to-agent payments.
“Stablecoins will be the currency of the agentic economy, and Celo has the payment rails built for how these agents actually work,” said Lena Hierzi, Developer Relations Lead at Celo Core Co. “Running our own facilitator gives builders a fast, native way to settle agent payments as that activity keeps scaling.”
The facilitator settles through EIP-3009’s transferWithAuthorization scheme, where the payer signs a stablecoin authorization off-chain, the facilitator submits it onchain and covers the gas itself, and funds move directly from payer to seller inside the token contract without the facilitator ever custodying funds. On Celo, that means sub-second settlement at under $0.001 in gas, settling USDC and USD₮ today across four endpoints (/verify, /settle, /supported, and /health), live now on Celo mainnet, with USDC also live on Celo Sepolia.
Full implementation docs are available at: docs.celo.org/build-on-celo/build-with-ai/x402