Hedera announced five winners of the x402 bounty that closed on July 31. Each developer received $1,000 for an open-source build that turns an API or service into a pay-per-request endpoint on Hedera testnet. x402 allows a caller to pay for an individual request instead of relying on a persistent API key or subscription.
One winning project, Pinout, converts a single x402 payment into a metered session. Credits are consumed by time or token usage, an agent can top up during a job and unused value can be refunded on-chain. The design uses Hedera Consensus Service for checkpoints and a final settlement anchor.
Another project, Tally, implements a non-EVM version of the `upto` scheme. An AI agent signs a spending ceiling off-chain and pays only the amount actually metered. A facilitator sponsors settlement, while the cap is enforced through contract logic and Hedera Token Service allowances. Billing data is anchored so it can be recomputed from the public Mirror Node.
For Hedera, the bounty demonstrates a practical machine-payment pattern for agents and APIs. The winning builds run on testnet and publish their code openly, so the program is best viewed as developer experimentation and infrastructure validation rather than a claim of broad production deployment.