x402 Explained: Q&A with AdPrompt CTO Behkish Nassirzadeh

AdPrompt.ai, an AI-powered marketing platform for small businesses. Our marketing platform combines multiple purpose-built AI agents to deliver a comprehensive toolkit that helps small businesses like yours drive brand awareness and sales in your local market. In minutes, you can generate on-brand creative content, optimize across key marketing channels, and launch campaigns tailored to your location, audience, and voice. Our intelligence layer is powered by a suite of trained, specialized AI engines, each designed to automate and optimize a specific marketing or advertising task.

In addition to building this solution, the technical team at AdPrompt is also heavily involved in other agentic (use of AI agents) and blockchain industry initiatives including the release of a select number of agents in an emerging infrastructure called x402. We sat down with AdPrompt CTO, Behkish Nassirzadeh, PhD to learn more.

Behkish is a driving force behind the intelligence platform that powers the AdPrompt solution. He is an entrepreneur and researcher with a PhD in computer engineering and is passionate about building systems where security, intelligence, and scale converge. His extensive work spans blockchain, AI, and software security, and transforming complex ideas into real-world impact.

Read on for our interview with Behkish about the x402 AdPrompt initiative that was just announced (read the press release here). You can read about the companion announcement with ERC-8004 here.

What is x402 in laymen's terms?

In layman’s terms, x402 makes an API work like a “paywall” built into normal web requests. So, if you call a paid endpoint, it replies with HTTP 402 Payment Required plus clear payment instructions, you retry with a payment proof header, and then you get the result (and a receipt). 

Why is AdPrompt releasing agents in the x402 environment?

Because it turns every agent action into a clean, automated microtransaction over standard HTTP. Therefore, agents can buy capabilities on demand without user accounts, sessions, or complicated auth flows. That’s especially valuable for agent-to-agent workflows because one agent can call another agent’s paid endpoint, settle instantly in stablecoins, and keep the whole pipeline programmatic and composable. It also gives AdPrompt a faster market signal since every paid call is a real spend decision. This way we can see what customers genuinely want (and will pay for) much sooner than with free trials, surveys, or long sales cycles.

How can people apply x402 in their business strategy?

People can apply x402 by turning what they sell into clear, pay-per-use outcomes and charging per request, so revenue maps directly to usage instead of subscriptions or long onboarding. Because x402 lets clients (humans or AI agents) pay programmatically over standard HTTP “without accounts, sessions, or complex authentication,” it also enables agent-to-agent microtransactions where services can buy each other’s capabilities on demand

Can anyone use x402? What's needed to try it?

Yes, anyone can use x402. For providers, you need a paid endpoint that can return HTTP 402 Payment Required with machine-readable payment instructions, plus a way to verify/settle the payment often via a facilitator like Coinbase CDP, or your own settlement logic.

For consumers, you just need a wallet/client that can handle the 402 response, create the payment proof; Coinbase provides buyer quickstarts and client libraries that do that for you. So, in practice you mainly need a compatible crypto wallet/client. 

How do our agents in x402 interoperate with other agents and what can they do?

AdPrompt’s agents interoperate with other agents because x402 standardizes the “paywall handshake” at the HTTP layer. Any agent that understands x402 can call an AdPrompt endpoint, receive an HTTP 402 response with machine-readable payment instructions. That same pattern works in reverse too, meaning AdPrompt agents can also pay and consume other x402-enabled agent endpoints without custom integrations or account setup. In practice, each run returns both a human-readable report link and a machine-readable JSON bundle, so agents can automate downstream steps while humans can review the result quickly.

What do you see as the future of micro-payments in the marketing and advertising industry?

Micro-payments have always existed in advertising through pricing models like CPM, but settlement is still slow, funds typically batch up and clear on delayed terms while buyers often prepay or maintain balances. Hence, buyers pay for packages (i.e., 10,000 impressions in bulk) in the current market. However, the future is real-time, programmatic settlement where buyers pay instantly. This will push advertising toward “pay for outcomes, not packages,” where brands and even AI agents buy one verified action (i.e.,  one verified impression, or one lead) at the moment they need it. Thus, cash flow and trust improve across the supply chain. Protocols like x402 enable that shift by making payment part of a normal web request with very low cost, which also unlocks agent-to-agent commerce and faster feedback on what the market actually values.

As CTO of AdPrompt you have been the key driver of the agentic solution powering the platform. What is most exciting to you about applying agentic solutions to real-world business applications?

What’s most exciting is that agentic systems turn business goals into execution quickly and cost-effectively. Instead of generating a plan and stopping, an agent can run the workflow end-to-end, collect context, make decisions, trigger the right tools, produce deliverables, and improve with feedback. Thus, small teams can get enterprise-grade output without enterprise overhead. It also creates a more collaborative ecosystem where businesses complement each other’s services through interoperable workflows rather than competing on every layer. In practice, that means faster iteration, less manual coordination, and more measurable outcomes because the agent is accountable to a concrete result, not just a chat response.