Build Agents That Can Pay with x402: From Your Laptop to a Live Network

AI agents are starting to act on their own, but an agent that can’t pay for anything is stuck asking a human for a credit card. In this hands-on workshop you’ll build an AI agent that pays its own way, using x402, the open standard that lets software settle payments over HTTP. Along the way, you’ll do something most developers never have: spin up your own distributed ledger on your laptop, build and test the entire payment flow, and then run the same code on the Hedera public test network for validation.

The reason that portability works is open source. Hedera runs on Hiero, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, so the network on your machine and the global public network speak the same protocol. We’ll keep that part conceptual and the rest hands-on: by the end, you’ll have an agent that requests a paid resource, receives an HTTP 402, settles the payment on-ledger, and gets what it asked for. You’ll leave with a working reference for agentic commerce and a clear mental model for taking it from a laptop to a public network, and eventually to production.