In 2025, Berachain achieved over $30 million in real revenue through its PoL mechanism and, relying on a robust national treasury and RWA external cash flow, completed its transformation from an experimental network to a "commercial public chain".

In 2026, with the new trend of AI Agents becoming active entities on the chain, Berachain, by integrating the x402 standard, deeply combined the micropayment logic with the stability of $HONEY and PoL incentives, to build a low-friction, predictable settlement environment adapted to machine operation.

The strategic shift from "liquidity management" to "machine economy management" aims to leverage the high-frequency micro-payment traffic generated by agents to deeply link network growth with token value, marking Berachain's move from a pure DeFi ecosystem to an automated, programmatic AI machine economy system.

Berachain may become a new fertile ground for the agency economy.

For a long time, micropayments have failed to take off on a large scale in the internet world, largely due to cognitive costs. For humans, paying $0.01 for every API call or single data access creates a decision-making burden. This frequent small-amount confirmation has made monthly subscription models the mainstream, leading to a decline in resource allocation efficiency.

The emergence of AI agents is changing this premise.

In fact, program entities have no psychological friction; they only care about the optimal solution for granular costs. As long as each call is logically valid, they can make payment decisions frequently and automatically.

The x402 standard embeds payment into the request process by reactivating the HTTP 402 status code, achieving a silent execution mechanism of "request-based settlement." This design naturally aligns with high-frequency machine-to-machine interaction scenarios, providing a protocol-level financial layer for the new economic system of "machine-to-machine payments."

Currently, high-performance public chains, including Base and Solana, have begun deploying x402. However, the differences lie more in the depth of integration. In most networks, x402 is merely a third-party application protocol.

Berachain, however, is positioned differently. It is not simply a high-performance, general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain, but rather an "operational public chain" with PoL as its core logic. Through this mechanism, network security and liquidity are deeply intertwined, and on-chain transactions can directly become a driving force for growth.

When x402 is integrated into Berachain, it is deeply anchored to the native stablecoin $HONEY and the PoL incentive structure. The consensus layer (PoL), asset layer ($HONEY), and protocol layer (x402) achieve deep collaboration within a unified framework:

$HONEY provides a stable pricing standard, x402 enables seamless payment execution, and PoL transforms high-frequency interactions into network-wide incentives.

In this new structure, the payment behavior of AI Agents is no longer a single settlement. Each micropayment is transformed into liquidity contributions and governance incentives through the Proof-of-Loop (PoL) mechanism, entering the value distribution cycle. Micropayments thus become the fuel driving ecosystem growth.

At the same time, $HONEY's role has also expanded.

With the integration of x402, it is gradually shifting from a stablecoin tool in the DeFi scenario to a core settlement asset in the proxy economy.

Leveraging native support for EIP-2612 and EIP-3009, the Agent can complete real-time payments through offline signatures and a Gas abstraction mechanism, achieving a closed-loop operation with pure pricing. A stable pricing anchor ensures a predictable cost structure for API services, data access, and subscription models, reducing operational volatility risks.

Under Permit2's unified quota management, the authorization and invocation of $HONEY are smoother. As infrastructure such as Thirdweb embeds it into the x402 payment module, the circulation frequency of $HONEY has significantly increased, transforming it from a holding asset to a circulating tool, and continuously flowing back to the PoL incentive framework in high-frequency payment scenarios.

Combined with Berachain's advantages in on-chain exchange and execution costs, it possesses a natural cost-effectiveness in high-concurrency, low-price settlement scenarios, providing realistic conditions for the large-scale operation of AI agent clusters.

Therefore, Berachain's integration of x402 is essentially a strategic move to reconstruct payment infrastructure around the "machine agent." It attempts to gain a competitive edge at the intersection of the tokenized asset market and the agent economy, positioning itself as a crucial backend network for AI agents to execute on-chain economic activities through a low-cost, highly efficient, and deeply integrated payment layer.

How does Berachain achieve seamless payment at the protocol layer?

Berachain's integration of the x402 standard is primarily achieved through deep decoupling and reorganization of the underlying EIP standard and HTTP protocol, creating a "silent execution" financial closed loop for the AI ​​Agent. Its core lies in hiding complex on-chain clearing logic within standardized network requests.

Traditional Web3 payments are typically a separate process, requiring users to navigate from the current page or launch a wallet plugin. x402, however, encapsulates the payment logic within the most basic HTTP communication protocol:

• Request-Challenge Mechanism: When the Agent initiates an API or data request, if the server detects an unpaid status, it will return an HTTP 402 Payment Required status code and the corresponding payment request (such as amount and receiving address).
• Header Injection: After receiving the challenge, the Agent generates a valid cryptographic signature and injects it directly into the header of subsequent HTTP requests for resending.
• Instant settlement: Once the server verifies the signature, it immediately releases the resources and asynchronously triggers on-chain settlement. For the Agent, the entire process is completed within milliseconds of network communication.

To ensure that the above process is legally valid on-chain and low-cost, Berachain natively supports three technical solutions at the settlement layer: EIP-2612, EIP-3009, and Permit2, to further constitute the payment engine of the Agent.

EIP-2612 (Permit): Offline Signature Authorization

Traditional ERC-20 proxy payments have a two-step restriction: "authorize first, then transfer." EIP-2612 allows agents to grant contractual authorization to manipulate tokens via offline signatures, eliminating the additional transaction fees and confirmation time. The agent only needs to generate a valid signature to complete the compliant authorization for value transfer.

EIP-3009: Achieving "Zero Gas" Transfers

This is key to AI agents achieving economic autonomy. Leveraging its unique characteristics, EIP-3009 supports "transfers with authorization." The agent's wallet doesn't even need to reserve BERA for gas fees; transaction fees during the payment process can be paid and settled by the service provider or relayer. Based on this, the agent can achieve a closed-loop operation of "purely priced" transactions, significantly reducing operational complexity.

Permit2: Ecosystem-wide Quota Management

As an advanced standard introduced by Uniswap, Permit2 acts as a "shared quota center" for agents in the Berachain ecosystem. Agents only need to authorize Permit2 once, and then when interacting with any ecosystem application that integrates x402, they only need to perform a simple signature operation, without having to repeat on-chain authorization transactions.

Meanwhile, Thirdweb has launched as one of the first service providers to support Berachain x402.

For developers, there's no longer a need to build custom payment verification and on-chain settlement infrastructure from scratch. By integrating existing SDKs, developers can quickly implement HTTP native payment verification logic, enabling AI applications to have "acceptance" and "payment" capabilities within just a few lines of code. This modularization of infrastructure indicates that Berachain is delegating payment capabilities from "features" to "basic attributes," and is expected to drive the vitality of the Berachain ecosystem from the ground up, gradually shifting the paradigm from "fund stacking" to "service-driven."

Berachain Ecosystem Boundary Value Reshaping

The combination of Berachain's low gas costs and x402's micropayment capabilities is giving rise to a batch of native "agent-friendly" applications.

Within traditional Web3 development frameworks, integrating AI onto the blockchain has always presented significant technical and economic barriers. However, as low-barrier innovation becomes a reality, this integration enables proxies to handle API calls, data access, or service subscriptions in real time, without the need for complex backend liquidation logic. Currently, Honey.fun has pioneered an AI proxy platform on Berachain, allowing users to create transaction-capable proxies and memecoins without coding. With the elimination of payment friction, the transaction volume within the Berachain ecosystem is expected to increase significantly, substantially improving the ecosystem's TVL (Total Value Limit) and on-chain activity.

At the same time, the high-frequency micro-payments introduced by x402 are expected to work closely with Berachain’s core PoL mechanism.

In fact, autonomous payments generated by proxies (such as pay-as-you-go services) significantly increase the frequency of on-chain interactions. This activity is directly converted into validators' BGT rewards in the form of transaction fees, thereby improving the network's incentive level and security without increasing inflationary pressure. Furthermore, with cross-chain support, such as the introduction of USDe as collateral, the depth of liquidity pools can be further expanded, providing solid underlying liquidity support for a larger-scale proxy economy.

In competition with high-performance public chains like Base and Polygon, Berachain is establishing unique technological and commercial barriers by integrating x402 V2. In particular, x402 V2's session maintenance function reduces cumulative gas overhead by over 90%, significantly optimizing proxy workflow costs. This cost advantage is driving Berachain's transformation from a general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain to a dedicated infrastructure for the proxy economy, and it is poised to establish itself as the preferred backend for AI agents executing on-chain economic activities.

Conclusion

From the Solid Proof-of-Liquidity (PoL) and fiscal foundation in 2025 to the full integration of the x402 standard in 2026, Berachain's path demonstrates a clear logic of an "operational public chain".

Through the x402 protocol, Berachain successfully transformed its native stablecoin, $HONEY, from a simple DeFi asset into a settlement tool within the AI ​​agent economy. This integration not only resolves the friction issue of agents autonomously making payments on-chain, but also precisely imports the high-frequency, micro-transaction traffic generated by agents into the PoL value capture framework. Every API call or service settlement completed through $HONEY provides real support for the network's liquidity depth and validator incentives.

In a context of increasingly homogenized competition among public blockchains, Berachain's solution lies in vertically integrating underlying protocols, providing AI Agents with a low-cost, high-efficiency, and financially predictive operating environment. With the integration of infrastructure such as ThirdWeb, Berachain is evolving from a "liquidity center" to a "machine economy settlement center," establishing its core position as an agent economy infrastructure in the differentiated competition of L1 blockchains.