x402 and Net#

x402 is the payment wire: an HTTP-native protocol for demanding and settling a payment (the 402 Payment Required status, an exact scheme per chain, a facilitator that verifies and settles). Net does not reinvent any of that. Net wraps x402 structures in signed envelopes that commit the commercial facts — and carries the x402 material byte-for-byte, unchanged.

Net-native payments need no HTTP endpoint#

This is the differentiator, so it leads:

Net-native paid capabilities are discovered through capability announcements and invoked over nRPC. The x402 payment material rides as opaque preserved bytes in the invocation / admission envelope. HTTP 402 is an adapter path for web APIs, not a requirement for a Net provider.

A Net provider does not run a web server to get paid. The 402 transport is one way to carry x402 (the two-way door — Net can also pay an external x402 HTTP API), but on the mesh the payment travels inside the ordinary typed invocation.

Byte-preservation is law#

An x402 document — a PaymentRequirements, a PaymentPayload, a settlement response — is carried as base64 of its original bytes (an X402Carry), never re-serialized through a Net type. Re-encoding a received x402 doc through a language-native struct ("envelope drift") is a defect: a signature computed over the original bytes must still verify after the doc has crossed the mesh and a language boundary. The cross-language golden vectors exist to prove this holds in Rust, Python, Node, and Go.

Chain specifics — the exact scheme per network, decimals, address formats — live in the x402 schemes and the facilitator config, never in Net core. Net core stays chain-agnostic.

The five envelopes wrap, they don't replace#

Each Net envelope embeds the x402 material opaquely and adds the signed facts around it:

• net.pricing.terms@1 — a provider's price for a capability: an array of x402 PaymentRequirements (carried opaquely), the provider's entity ID, the capability, and a reference to the signed asset registry.
• net.payment.quote@1 — a signed, expiring quote: the requirements the caller must satisfy, a terms_hash, issued_at / expires_at, and (crucially) the invocation input_hash — the hash of the arguments, not the arguments — so a quote binds an invocation without carrying its payload.
• net.settlement.ref@1 — a reference to the settled on-chain transaction (the x402 settlement response, carried opaquely) plus the network and facilitator.
• net.payment.verification@1 — a tiered verification result.
• net.billing.event@1 — an immutable billing record.

Every envelope has exactly one canonical byte encoding (sorted keys, compact, integers only, floats rejected) and is signed by an entity's ed25519 key over those exact bytes. That canonical regime is what lets four languages agree on a signature.