Verified payments
Keep the x402 402 → pay → settle loop. Add a proof policy so humans, journalists, or named organizations get a different price than an unverified agent. Claims stay canonical; private attributes stay off-chain.
Protocol 01 · x402 extension
Agents can pay. They still cannot prove who they are.
zkx402 adds zero-knowledge credentials and content provenance to x402, so an agent can pay in USDC, prove it is human or authorized, and show where the payload came from — without handing over the underlying data.
What we ship
Provenance on the payload
Producers attach ZK proofs of authorship, human creation, or sensor origin. Buyers pay for data they can actually trust. The whistleblower case from Buenos Aires still holds: get paid without revealing who you are.
Who it is for
- Agent platforms APIs that already speak HTTP 402 and need a trust layer before an autonomous wallet spends.
- Publishers & data owners Sell access with identity-based pricing instead of a single public rate.
- Model builders Buy private datasets at a discount when the buyer can prove they are a named lab, not an anonymous scraper.
Traction
Built in 36 hours at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires, 2025. Finalist out of 754 projects. Open-source under GPL-3.0, forked from the original vhspace/zkx402 implementation. Company repo: ayelahlabs/zkx402.
Company
Ayelah Labs is a San Francisco protocol studio founded by Mark Ballew. We are taking zkx402 from hackathon artifact to production infrastructure for agent commerce.
Press and partnerships: hello@ayelahlabs.com