The Good Tech Companies - Can AI Agents Pay Each Other? How Cronos Is Testing the Next Frontier with x402 PayTech Hackathon

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/can-ai-agents-pay-each-other-how-cronos-is-testing-the-next-frontier-with-x402-paytech-hackathon. Cronos launches x402 PayTech Hackathon with $42,000 prize pool to build AI agents that handle autonomous payments on blockchain infrastructure. Check more stories related to tech-stories at: https://hackernoon.com/c/tech-stories. You can also check exclusive content about #cronos, #hackathon, #web3, #cryptocurrency, #dlt, #ai, #crypto.com, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @ishanpandey. Learn more about this writer by checking @ishanpandey's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Cronos x402 Hackathon offers $42K for developers building AI agents with autonomous payment capabilities.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Can AI agents pay each other? How Kronos is testing the next frontier with X-402 paydeckathon by Ashon Pondy? Greater than what happens when artificial intelligence can pay for things without asking a greater than human first. That question sits at the center of Kronos's new X-402 Patech hackathon, a global builder challenge offering $42,000 in prizes for developers willing to experiment with technology that most people have never heard of but may soon affect how every online transaction works. The hackathon targets developers building applications that let AI agents conduct payments autonomously on blockchain networks. Registration opens on Dora hacks, with the build period

running from early December through late January. For more details, developers can visit the hackathon page. Developer Resources Crypto.com AI agent SDK supports Kronos ZKEVM and EVM for agents reading blockchain data via natural language. Integration guides show one-line payment acceptance. TestNet Fawcett provides tokens. Workshops cover integration patterns. Office hours with Kronos Labs and crypto. Com engineers.

Security requirements. AI agents with wallets create attack surfaces. Prompt injection can MIS direct funds. Merkel Science Notes systems remain highly susceptible. Implements pending limits and multi-signature even in proofs of concept. Why this matters. matters. Traditional rails need days for clearing and fees making micropayments uneconomical. X-402 settles on chain instantly. No intermediaries, accounts, or subscriptions.

Kronos proof of authority delivers 60,000 TPS with 500 milliseconds blocks. Target-specific workflows where autonomous payments remove friction. API marketplaces with per-quiry pricing or automated research data purchasing work better than generalized platforms. The forgotten HTTP code getting a second life, the internet was supposed to have native payments from the beginning. When engineers drafted HTTP in the early 1990s, they reserved status code 402 for payment required. The idea was simple. Websites could request digital payments before serving content, like a vending machine requests coins before dispensing to snack. The code sat unused

for three decades. Digital payment infrastructure did not exist when the specification was written. The X-402 protocol resurrects that dormant code. Developed by Coinbase, X-402 allows any web server to request payment through standard HTTP headers. When a server responds with 402, the client, whether human or AI agent, can automatically send cryptocurrency and retry the request. Settlement happens in really 200 milliseconds compared to days for traditional bank transfers. The protocol charges zero fees at the infrastructure level, works across multiple blockchains, and requires as little as one line of code to implement. For AI agents, this removes a fundamental barrier. Software that can browse the web, call APIs, and execute code could not previously spend money without

human approval for each transaction. X-402 changes that equation. The stakes for blockchain payment infrastructure. The hackathon represents more than a developer competition. Kronos is positioning itself within a race to define how AI systems will interact with financial infrastructure. The Kronos 2025-2026 roadmap targets $20 billion in CRO market presence, $10 billion in tokenized assets, and 20 million users by 2026. The network has settled over 100 million transactions since inception and holds more than $6 billion in user assets, ranking among the top 15 blockchain ecosystems. Integration with crypto, Com, provides distribution to over 150 million retail U.S.ERS. Recent partnerships with Amazon

Web Services offer selected builders up to $100,000 in AWS credits for scaling AI-powered applications. Infrastructure bets before application winners. Every major platform shift produces winners at the infrastructure layer before application level success stories emerge. The teams building infrastructure to remove constraints on AI spending are making a reasonable bet on where value will concentrate. Kronos is not the only player. Coinbase developed X-402, Google has integrated similar capabilities, and a growing list of payment infrastructure startups are competing for developer attention.

What Kronos offers is a high-performance blockchain with existing distribution channels and a specific focus on AI agent readiness. The $42,000 prize pool is modest by cryptocurrency standards. The real opportunity lies in building relationships with an ecosystem that has resources to support promising projects beyond the competition period. Whether AI agents will actually handle a significant portion of economic transactions remains uncertain. But the infrastructure enabling that possibility is being built now. Don't forget to like and share the story. This author is an independent contributor publishing

via our business blogging program. Hacker Noon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims here and belong to the author. Hashtag D.Y. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.