Pay.sh — a joint launch from the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud — went live this week, and it is the first time a hyperscaler has agreed to take stablecoin payments natively over x402. AI agents can now spend USDC on Solana to call Gemini, BigQuery, Vertex AI, plus 50+ third-party APIs including OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes, Helius, Alchemy, Dune Analytics, and Nansen. For any AI agent developer UK, crypto developer UK, or payment developer building on autonomous infrastructure, this is the most consequential x402 deployment to date.
Stripe, Meta, Alipay, and now Solana + Google Cloud — the production deployments are no longer trickling in. The agentic commerce stack is shipping at hyperscaler density.
What Pay.sh Actually Is
The architecture is deliberately thin. Pay.sh sits as an API proxy on Google Cloud Platform, in front of the existing Gemini, BigQuery, and Vertex AI endpoints. When an agent makes a request, the proxy can either let it through (free tier, authenticated user, etc.) or respond with an HTTP 402 Payment Required. The agent then settles on Solana — sub-cent USDC — and retries. The proxy verifies, releases the response, and bills the agent's wallet.
Two protocols do the heavy lifting:
-
x402 — Coinbase's HTTP-native payment standard, transferred to the Linux Foundation in April. Provides the
402 Payment Requiredflow, payment instructions header, and the receipt format. - MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) — Stripe and Tempo's spec for agent-to-agent payment intent. Pay.sh accepts both, which is significant: it normalises the "two competing protocols" narrative into "use whichever your agent runtime emits."
For the developer, the surface area is tiny. An MCP- or LangChain-style tool emits an HTTP request; the SDK handles the 402 dance underneath. A Solana wallet — from Privy, Phantom programmatic, or a custodial agent wallet — signs the transfer.
Why This Is the First Real x402 Production Story
x402 has had a handful of production endpoints since the protocol launched, but Pay.sh is the first time a top-three hyperscaler is on the receive side. The implications matter:
- Catalogue scale. Gemini, BigQuery, and Vertex AI are some of the most-called APIs on the public internet. Pay.sh routes every one of those calls through an x402-aware proxy — instantly making Solana stablecoins a first-class payment rail for AI workloads.
- Long tail attached. The 50+ community providers (Codex, Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes, Helius, Alchemy, Dune, Nansen) ride the same proxy. Adding new endpoints is now an SDK integration, not a billing-team negotiation.
- Per-call economics. Agents pay fractions of a cent per call with no minimum spend. This kills the legacy SaaS metering model for the agentic use case — there is no enterprise contract, no monthly invoice, no procurement cycle. The agent expenses what it consumes.
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About the Author
I'm Tom Wang, an AI Developer & Fintech Developer — building AI agents, crypto payment infrastructure, and cross-border payout systems with Rust, Go, and TypeScript. Based in London, UK.
Currently open to new opportunities in fintech, crypto payments, and AI agent engineering.
