Lightning Labs, the developer of the Lightning Network, has launched the L402 Bitcoin proxy payment website

According to The Defiant, Lightning Labs, the company behind the Lightning network development tools, launched a dedicated website for the L402 protocol on Wednesday, positioning the protocol as a channel for AI agents to make payments in Bitcoin. The company stated that with L402, agents can make payments in Bitcoin and complete identity verification natively, without the need for accounts, intermediaries, or human involvement, and described L402 as a protocol for machine-to-machine commerce on Lightning.

It disclosed that the addition is a website rather than the protocol itself. L402, or Lightning HTTP 402 protocol, has previously existed in Lightning Labs' tech stack, and its standard implementation, Aperture, is currently being used by the non-custodial exchange service Lightning Loop. This mechanism reuses the HTTP 402 status code, where the server returns a 402 along with a validation header containing tokens and Lightning invoices when the client requests a restricted interface. After the client makes a payment, it accesses the interface with the token and payment original, allowing the server to complete verification without querying the payment database.