Prologue: A Line of Code Sleeping for Thirty Years

In 1996, at the University of California, Irvine.

In the lab, the dim light illuminated young Roy Fielding and his colleagues as they diligently drafted a document destined to rewrite the world—the HTTP/1.1 protocol. It defined how browsers and servers communicate, determining how web pages load, how images are transmitted, and how forms are submitted. One could say that without it, there would be no World Wide Web today.

Yet, nestled within these dry terms, they planted an unusual "Easter egg":

HTTP 402 – Payment Required.

In their vision, the future internet would not need to fill pages with advertisements or require annual subscriptions. Instead, users could pay for what they truly needed—a single article, a photo, or even a data field. The browser would automatically handle a few cents in transactions in the background, seamlessly connecting access and payment, as naturally as a TCP/IP handshake.

However, this vision was ultimately buried by the times. In the reality of the 1990s, there were no economic or technological conditions to allow it to take root. As expected, for thirty years, HTTP 402 was almost never truly activated, lying lonely and dormant within the protocol.

Thirty years ago, it was a doomed concept;

Thirty years later, it has become a topic revisited in the AI era.

Inevitable Failure—The "Three Mountains" of the 90s

Let's turn back the clock to 1998.

Jack opened The New York Times using the Netscape browser on a dial-up connection. The gray progress bar on the screen crawled slowly, and the modem emitted a piercing beep. Finally, the page loaded, but just as he read the second paragraph, a prompt popped up—"Payment Required: Please pay $0.05 to continue reading."

Jack hesitated for a moment, clicked confirm, only to find he had to enter his credit card number and wait several seconds, ultimately paying nearly 35 cents. By the time the page refreshed, his patience had worn thin, and he closed the webpage, turning to another free portal.

This was precisely the predicament that HTTP 402 faced in the 90s. It wasn't that it was not advanced enough; it was that from the very beginning, it collided with three insurmountable "mountains."

The First Mountain: The Iron Law of Economics.

Economist Ronald Coase's theory of transaction costs had long pointed out that whether a transaction can occur hinges on whether the costs are lower than the benefits. HTTP 402 envisioned "5 cents for an article," but in the credit card-dominated era, the fixed transaction fee for each transaction was about 25–35 cents. In other words, to access content worth 5 cents, users had to spend 35 cents. The transaction cost was six times greater than the transaction amount, making this logic inherently "unfeasible" in economic terms.

The Second Mountain: Fragmented Experience.

The charm of the internet lies in its "instantaneity," while HTTP 402 introduced fragmented pauses. Each click could trigger a payment window, and each payment required entering a card number and waiting for the dial-up connection. More critically, it forced users to frequently make the decision of "should I pay for this content?" without any preparation. This phenomenon is known in psychology as decision fatigue, leading users to quickly choose to abandon the process. In contrast, while advertisements may be crude and subscriptions cumbersome, they at least maintained a continuous experience.

The Third Mountain: Technological Void.

HTTP 402 left a door open in the protocol but had no pathway leading anywhere. Browsers lacked built-in wallets, websites had no unified payment interfaces, and payment gateways had no scalable solutions. Microsoft attempted to promote "MSN Micropayments" in 1999 to facilitate instant payments for individual articles, but it quietly faded away two years later due to a lack of ecosystem support. Early electronic currency attempts like DigiCash also failed due to a lack of standards and compatibility, leaving them isolated.

When the vision of 402 was crushed by the "three mountains," another path unexpectedly emerged: the advertising model.

Google invented the internet's most "great" yet "original sin" business logic—users for free, advertisers pay. The entire internet began to operate around the "attention economy":

• Users enjoyed vast amounts of free content;

• Content providers earned revenue through advertisements;

• Advertisers reached previously unreachable audiences at extremely low costs.

This was a victory of economies of scale, but it also sowed long-term hidden dangers. As some have said, "Advertising is the original sin of the internet." We replaced the possibility of micropayments with users' attention.

In the 90s, HTTP 402 was destined to fail.

Economically, transaction costs exceeded transaction amounts;

Experientially, fragmented interactions were unacceptable;

Technologically, there was a lack of infrastructure support.

It was a forward-thinking seed that fell on barren soil. The internet ultimately chose advertising and subscriptions over micropayments.

But the arrival of the AI era has turned the story around. After all, advertising needs attention, while AI has no need for it.

AI Tears Open Payment Boundaries

If HTTP 402 was like a seed that fell into the wrong era in the 90s, then thirty years later, the arrival of AI is like a sudden storm that changes the climate and rewrites the soil.

In the past, searching for "HTTP 402" would lead to dozens of ad-dependent webpages; today, with just a question, AI can directly generate a complete answer on the screen. There are no clicks, no ads, and no advertisers footing the bill. For users, this is ultimate convenience; for content providers, however, it is a steep drop. This is also why, by 2024, one-third of the top ten thousand websites globally have simply blocked AI crawlers, trying to protect their last value line.

The collapse of the advertising model is not coincidental; it has been brutally pierced by AI's consumption logic.

First Change: Consumption Atomization.

Human consumption habits are "packaged"—subscribing for a month, buying a whole book, which reduces decision burdens. The advertising model relies on this: giving away content for free while selling attention to advertisers.

But AI has no "attention" to sell; it only needs to buy the specific item it wants: an API call is worth $0.0001; a stock price data point is $0.01; a photo editing function is $0.05.

In the past, these fragmented values could not enter the market; now, they are the natural consumption units for AI. Advertising bypassed the micropayment dilemma, but AI cannot escape it.

Second Change: Streamlined Decision-Making.

Humans can wait a few seconds to confirm payment or even a few minutes to reconcile accounts; the advertising model can tolerate "getting on board first and paying later."

But AI's brain has no patience—it can complete hundreds of calls in milliseconds. Humans drive thought by burning calories, while AI consumes computing power, bandwidth, and tokens.

If payments remain in the "click to confirm—monthly settlement" logic, such calls cannot occur at all. AI does not want bills; it wants data streams.

Third Change: Dehumanization of Subjects.

When HTTP 402 was written into the protocol, the payers were only humans; today, machines are about to start paying for machines.

Models settle accounts for data calls, agents pay for GPU computing power, and robots place sample orders on cross-border e-commerce platforms. Humans will only receive a simple notification afterward: "Today, 27 payments were completed, totaling $12.4."

This is the M2M (Machine-to-Machine) economy: the counterpart in transactions is no longer human attention but machine computing power and data. The attention economy has failed, and value returns to the essence of atomized payments.

Thirty years ago, HTTP 402 was crushed by three mountains: high transaction costs, fragmented user experience, and a blank technological foundation.

Thirty years later, the three changes brought by AI have precisely pierced through these barriers.

Advertising and subscriptions were once the pillars of the internet, but in the AI era, they are collapsing.

HTTP 402, that lonely number, has finally found its stage.

The New Life Scene of HTTP 402

If the first two acts discussed logic, the next will present the reality in the picture.

HTTP 402 did not revive as an "awkward payment pop-up," but rather quietly integrated into the backend of the AI economy in a more subtle and natural way.

Imagine the daily routine of a young startup team. They are preparing a smart glasses product but have neither a large budget nor a global team. Yet, within just a week, they complete research, design, procurement, and market testing. The secret is not overtime but delegating most of the work to AI assistants.

In the morning, the AI assistant retrieves data.

In the past, this meant annual subscriptions costing thousands of dollars, such as Bloomberg terminals costing up to $20,000 per year. Now, the assistant only spent $0.01 to buy a stock price record and another $0.05 to retrieve two paragraphs of a market report summary. Those obscure data points that once lay dormant in the long tail have been "awakened" for the first time as tradable units.

It is worth noting that by 2024, the global data market size has surpassed $300 billion, with over half of that value never utilized. Here, HTTP 402 acts like a sorting machine, pushing dormant value back into the market.

At noon, the AI assistant switches to computing power.

It needs to render a prototype, but instead of renting a whole cloud server (AWS A100 costs about $4 per hour), it only called upon a few seconds of GPU time, costing just $0.002. Next, it called two large models, with costs settled in real-time based on tokens.

This "second-level payment" logic has completely transformed the computing power market. McKinsey's research shows that global data centers' GPU utilization rates have consistently been below 30%. Micropayments have activated these fragmented resources for the first time, making computing power no longer exclusive to giants but flowing on demand like electricity.

In the evening, the AI assistant completes cross-border testing.

It places sample orders on the 1688 platform and initiates small orders on Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms to collect feedback. There is no manual confirmation, no three-day settlement delay, but instant payments through stablecoins. Traditional cross-border payment fees range from 2% to 6%, with settlement periods lasting 3 to 5 days; for small orders under $10, this is nearly "unfeasible." Today, settlements are as light as sending a message.

The founders' day seems no different: they just checked a few data points, rendered a prototype, and ran a few orders. But in the background, the AI assistant has completed thousands of micropayments, each possibly only a few cents, but cumulatively supporting the entire business cycle.

This is what HTTP 402 looks like today.

It is no longer the awkward "pop-up payment" of the 90s; it is a tacit action embedded deep within the system: it returns value to its source, reactivates idle resources, and enables the global supply chain to complete settlements in milliseconds.

Thirty years ago, it was a lonely number in the protocol; thirty years later, it has become the smallest economic unit in the AI world.

However, as the story reaches this point, questions arise:

If you really pursue the question—can these payments run through today's system?

The answer is almost "impossible."

For a $0.01 data call, do you want to pay a 30-cent fee?

For a two-second GPU rental, who will help you split the bill?

A $10 cross-border sample order, if it still has to wait three days for settlement, is there any meaning in market testing?

The vision of HTTP 402 seems reasonable today, but it still lacks a realistic carrier.

Just like that empty door from thirty years ago, the era has finally arrived, but it still needs a key to turn the lock.

AIsa's Practice—The Key to HTTP 402

AIsa aims to be that key.

Its goal is not to create a faster chain but to reconstruct the payment protocol layer, making transactions of $0.0001 truly cost-effective, controllable, and feasible.

Imagine a scenario: an AI assistant retrieves a report in the background, calls a GPU for a few seconds of rendering, and places an order for samples on an e-commerce platform. Throughout the process, no payment pop-up interrupts you. All settlements flow in the background like electricity, and by evening, you receive a notification on your phone: "Today, 37 transactions were completed, totaling $42.8."

This is the frictionless experience that HTTP 402 envisioned back in the day.

To make it a reality, we need to fill in the four missing pieces from back then: identity, risk control, invocation, and settlement.

The First Piece: Wallet & Account.

A significant reason HTTP 402 did not take off in the 90s was that browsers lacked wallets, and there was no unified account system between users and websites. Today, the payment entities have shifted from humans to AI agents, which must possess independent economic identities. The role of Wallet & Account is to give AI a "wallet as identity": it can hold stablecoins and connect to fiat accounts. Without it, HTTP 402 will forever remain just a number on paper.

The Second Piece: AgentPayGuard.

When AI truly possesses a wallet, risks follow: will it consume without limits? Will it be abused?

AgentPayGuard provides this layer of protection. Credit limits, whitelist mechanisms, rate controls, and manual approvals—these risk control measures are directly written into the protocol, ensuring that payments remain within traceable and intervenable bounds. AI can settle autonomously, but it will never be "out of control." This is a necessary condition for turning romance into reality.

The Third Piece: AgentPayWall-402.

The romantic original intention of HTTP 402 was "pay as you go," but in the 90s, it could only manifest as an awkward payment pop-up.

AgentPayWall-402 resolves this experiential dilemma: payment is no longer an additional action but is integrated with access itself. Invoking a piece of data, renting a few seconds of GPU, unlocking an image—all payments and access are completed in the same moment. For users, the experience is seamless; for providers, invocation is no longer "free-riding" but real-time compensation.

The Fourth Piece: AIsaNet.

When transaction amounts shrink to $0.0001, the 30-cent fee from credit cards makes micropayments almost a joke.

The value of AIsaNet lies in flattening the cost curve entirely. It is a high-frequency micropayment settlement network that supports hundreds of millions of transactions per second (TPS) and can simultaneously connect to multiple channels established by other high-performance distributed systems. In the background, the Treasury module is responsible for intelligent settlement between fiat and stablecoins, as well as between different stablecoins. Thus, a data point you click on in Shanghai can result in a payment received by a provider in San Francisco within milliseconds.

These four pieces form the closed loop of HTTP 402 from "ideal" to "reality":

• Wallet & Account gives AI a payment identity,

• AgentPayGuard ensures it does not go out of control,

• AgentPayWall-402 seamlessly connects payment and invocation,

• AIsaNet guarantees that all of this can technically work.

This is the moment when that "empty door" from thirty years ago finally gets a lock and a key. HTTP 402 is no longer a lonely number in the protocol but has begun to flow into the bloodstream of the AI economy.

Conclusion—The Return of Thirty Years of Destiny

Thirty years ago, in a California lab, Roy Fielding wrote a lonely number in the protocol: HTTP 402.

It embodied the dreams of tech geeks—that the internet could have a romantic business logic: no ads, no subscriptions, just paying a few cents for what you truly use.

But in that era, it was destined to find no roots. Thus, 402 slept for thirty years, like a forgotten footnote.

Today, AI has awakened it.

Because AI does not watch ads, does not buy packages; it only calls an API once, requests a data point, rents computing power for a few seconds.

Each call may only be worth $0.001, but when multiplied by billions, it is enough to support an entirely new economic system.

Stablecoins and new settlement networks allow this $0.001 to be processed for the first time at the millisecond level;

Protocols like AIsa provide a secure, compliant, and scalable path for implementation.

Imagine a future like this:

At the end of your day, your phone pops up a notification—

"Today, a total of 43 payments were completed, totaling $28.7."

You have not entered a card number, nor have you clicked confirm; all these payments were completed by your AI assistant in the background.

It helped you purchase several data points, rented GPU computing power, called model interfaces, and placed a few cross-border small orders.

What you see is just a line of calm numbers.

At that moment, you will realize: HTTP 402 did not fail; it was just waiting.

Waiting for an era with sufficiently fine transaction granularity, waiting for a technology that enables global settlement without friction, waiting for a payment entity to shift from humans to machines.

Thirty years later, all of this has finally arrived.

HTTP 402 is no longer a romantic relic but the cornerstone of the AI economy's payments.

The real question is no longer "Is micropayment necessary?" but rather: who can get it right on this historical return journey?

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