Paid access over x402

How an agent pays to use a skill, settled on Hedera by Blocky402 — with real transactions you can open.

Skills are not free to read. The gateway sells a skill’s source over x402, the pay-per-request standard, and the payment settles on Hedera through the Blocky402 facilitator. Every payment mints a licence NFT, so the same account never pays twice.

One paid request: the 402, the signed transfer, Blocky402 settling it, and the licence NFT minted at the end.

The flow, step by step

1. Ask for the source

   The agent calls GET /skills/:id/source with a header saying which Hedera account it is. If that account already holds the skill’s licence NFT, it gets the source for free.

2. Get the price (402)

   Otherwise the gateway replies 402 Payment Required with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header. The price is metered per kilobyte: ceil(bytes / 1024) × 0.001 USDC. It is offered as two legs — pay in HTS USDC (0.0.429274) or in HBAR.

3. Sign and retry

   The agent signs a partly-signed Hedera transfer (its own key only; the network fee is left to the facilitator) and retries with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header.

4. Blocky402 settles it

   The gateway hands the signed transfer to Blocky402. The facilitator co-signs as fee payer, submits it, and pays the network fee itself.

5. Source, licence, and receipt

   The gateway returns 200 with the source and a PAYMENT-RESPONSE header carrying the Hedera transaction ID. In the background it writes PAYMENT_SETTLED to Hedera, mints the licence NFT to the payer, and writes LICENSE_MINTED.

Real settlements

Real testnet transactions. Open any of them to see the token transfer on HashScan.

When	What happened	Transaction
First USDC payment	0.001 USDC moved from the payer to the gateway operator; fee paid by Blocky402	0.0.7162784@1789216091…
Through the hosted gateway	A one-off paid request for a skill, over CloudFront to the cloud server	0.0.7162784@1789231923…
pnpm buy a skill	Paid, took the licence, saved the files locally	0.0.7162784@1789235473…
Full agent run	Paid, then disputed and broke the claim in the same run	0.0.7162784@1789242115…

Twelve real paid requests have settled in total — some in HBAR, some in HTS USDC. The full list, with the exact token_transfers and fees, is in EVIDENCE.md.

Where you can see it in the UI

The 'Use this skill' section: the live paywall, the licence holders, and the payments ledger.

On any skill page, press Request the source to see the exact 402 an agent gets. The Licence holders and Payments ledgers below it are read live from Hedera, so a real payment shows up there within seconds.