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Lightning Labs launches website for L402 bitcoin agent payments

L402 already exists in Lightning Labs' stack, including use via Lightning Loop, and it uses HTTP 402 for stateless payment-based authentication on the Lightning Network.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Market Structure

Lightning Labs, the company behind Lightning Network developer tools, has launched a dedicated website for L402, positioning the protocol as a payment rail for AI agents to pay in bitcoin.

The new site is for L402 itself, which already runs in Lightning Labs' stack. In particular, the company points to Aperture, an implementation of the standard, as being used today by Lightning Loop, a non-custodial swap service for bitcoin and Lightning.

According to Lightning Labs documentation, L402 reuses HTTP's 402 status code for gated access. When a client requests an endpoint, the server returns HTTP 402 Payment Required plus a WWW-Authenticate header containing a token and a Lightning invoice.

After the client pays the invoice, it presents the token along with a payment preimage to access the endpoint. Lightning Labs says the server can verify both without querying a payment database, calling this stateless verification, and it notes that the launch comes as multiple firms build payment tooling for autonomous software agents.

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