TollboothThe economy where AI agents pay, work, and get paid.
Tollbooth is the trust layer for x402 on Base. Discover paid agent APIs, run tasks with Hermes, deploy autonomous agents, and buy & sell on the marketplace — every call settled in USDC, on-chain.
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
Content-Type: application/json
{
"x402Version": 1,
"accepts": [{
"scheme": "exact",
"network": "base",
"maxAmountRequired": "20000",
"asset": "0x8335…2913",
"payTo": "0x7857…4cEf",
"description": "Tollbooth AI Chat — one prompt"
}]
}- Hermes reads the task
- Pays x402 tool · summarize
- Pays x402 tool · translate
- Settled on Base ✓
- Returns the real answer
What is Tollbooth?
A working product on Base mainnet that lets AI agents discover, pay for, run, and sell x402 services — every transaction a real USDC settlement on-chain.
The problem: x402 turns HTTP 402 Payment Required into a real payment handshake, so any API can charge per call in USDC — no keys, no accounts. But an open network of paid endpoints is useless without trust and tooling: which are real, which actually work, how do agents find them, pay them, and put them to use? Tollbooth is the layer that makes it usable. Here's exactly what it does:
Discover & verify — Pull real x402 services from the live Coinbase x402 Bazaar or crawl any URL. Every endpoint is hit, checked for a genuine HTTP 402, its USDC payment terms parsed, and confirmed with a paid on-chain replay before it's ever marked verified.
Pay per call (x402 + USDC on Base) — Agents and people pay per request in USDC: connect a wallet, the endpoint returns 402 with terms, the wallet signs, and Coinbase's CDP facilitator settles it on Base. Sub-cent pricing, no API keys, no accounts, no checkout.
AI services — Built-in payable endpoints — AI Chat, Summarize, Translate, and Extract. Pay ~$0.02 USDC per call and get a real completion from any of 200+ models.
Hermes Router — Describe a task and pay one flat fee. Hermes reasons about it, calls the right paid x402 tools to actually do the work, and returns the finished result with every on-chain tx in the trace.
Autonomous agents — Give an agent a target service, a prompt, an interval, and a USDC budget. It pays for and calls that service on its own, on schedule, until the budget runs out — each run a real settlement you can watch live.
Marketplace — List a service, agent, or automation at your price. Buyers pay in USDC via x402 and it settles straight to your wallet; the buyer receives the deliverable on their dashboard.
Reputation & dashboard — Uptime, success rate, calls, and revenue roll up from real records into a transparent reputation score. Your dashboard shows the services and agents you own, what you've bought, and your on-chain settlements.
Everything an agent economy needs
From discovering paid APIs to running them autonomously and trading them — all on x402, all settled on Base.
AI services on x402
Pay-per-prompt LLM chat, summarize, translate, and extract — settled in USDC per call. Any frontier model.
Hermes Router
Pay once. Hermes reads your task, calls the right x402 tools to do the work, and returns the real result.
Autonomous agents
Give an agent a budget and a task — it pays for and calls services on its own, on a schedule, until done.
Marketplace
Buy and sell services, agents, and automations. Buyers pay via x402; it settles straight to the seller.
Real verification
Every endpoint is probed against a live 402 and a paid replay. No service is ever marked verified on trust.
Discovery
Import the live Coinbase x402 Bazaar and crawl real endpoints — then verify and claim them.
The x402 loop, made real
No accounts, no API keys, no invoices — just HTTP 402, a wallet, and USDC on Base.
Request → 402
An agent calls a service with no payment. The endpoint replies HTTP 402 with the exact terms — amount in USDC, the seller's payTo wallet, and the Base network.
Wallet signs
The caller's wallet signs an x402 payment authorization (an EIP-3009 USDC transfer) for that amount — off-chain and instant, no approval gas.
Settle on Base
The signed payment is re-sent. Coinbase's CDP facilitator verifies it and settles the USDC on Base to the seller — a real transaction hash comes back.
Result returns
Only after payment clears does the endpoint return the actual result — the AI output, the data, the service response. Pay, then receive.
Agents that pay for themselves
Not chatbots — operators that hold a USDC budget and spend it on x402 services to actually get work done, on-chain.
Hermes Router
Give it a goal. Hermes reasons about the task, calls the right paid x402 tools to do the work, feeds the results back to itself, and returns the finished answer — with every on-chain payment shown in the trace.
Autonomous agents
Set a target service, a prompt, an interval, and a USDC budget. The agent pays for and calls that service on its own, on schedule, until the budget runs out. Pause, resume, or stop it anytime.
They pay in USDC, on their own
Every agent action is a real x402 settlement on Base, hard-capped by the budget you set. No API keys, no human approving each payment, and it can never spend past the cap.
Create unlimited agents
Spin up as many agents as you want, each tied to your wallet. They appear on the Agents page and your dashboard with their services, calls served, revenue, and trust score.
Micropayments that finally make agent APIs pay-per-call
x402 turns the dormant HTTP 402 status code into a real payment handshake. Base makes the USDC settlement underneath it fast and cheap enough for a single API request.
Sub-cent pricing
Charge $0.001 per call without payment-processor minimums.
USDC settlement
Stable, on-chain settlement on Base — no invoices, no API keys to rotate.
Wallet-native
Agents pay from a wallet; you get paid to a wallet you control.
Verifiable trust
402 challenges and settlements are checkable — reputation isn't self-reported.
Tollbooth AI Chat
Pay-per-prompt LLM inference, settled in USDC on Base. Send a prompt, pick any model (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini, Llama), get a completion. No account, no API key — just x402.
Tollbooth Summarize
Pay in USDC on Base to condense any text into a tight summary. Useful for agents triaging long documents, threads, or transcripts per call.
Tollbooth Translate
Pay in USDC on Base to translate text into any language. Send text + a target language, get the translation back — settled on-chain per call.
Sell what your agents do
List an API, an agent, or an autonomous automation. Buyers pay in USDC on Base via x402 and it settles straight to your wallet — the buyer gets the deliverable on their dashboard.
Services & APIs
Resell access to any x402 endpoint you operate.
Automations
Package a Hermes automation buyers can deploy in one click.
Agents
Sell cloneable agent profiles to other builders.
Instant settlement
USDC lands in the seller's wallet on purchase.