ERC-8162: The Subscription Layer for the Agentic Economy

The Opportunity

The agentic economy runs on two primitives today: identity (ERC-8004) and per-request payments (x402). Per-request works well for transactional calls where each request has a known, fixed cost. Many agent interactions follow a different pattern. They are conversations. The work depends on the prompt, users iterate across multiple messages, and agents ask clarifying questions. For these use cases, a subscription model is a natural fit: a developer debugging code with an AI assistant benefits from unlimited back-and-forth, a portfolio monitoring agent benefits from persistent access, and collaborating agents benefit from pre-established payment relationships.

x402 solved the hard problem of making payments native to HTTP. ERC-8162 solves the next problem: making ongoing access relationships native to the agentic economy.

What ERC-8162 Does

ERC-8162 is a subscription protocol for onchain AI agents. It lets any agent offer tiered, cycle-based access plans (think "5 USDC/month for basic" or "20 USDC/month for pro") that users subscribe to with a single onchain transaction. After subscribing, every request has no other cost attached.

The protocol is:

Fully onchain. Plans, subscriptions, and access verification live on the smart contract. No offchain billing infrastructure needed.
Direct settlement. Payments go straight from subscriber to agent owner. The contract never holds funds.
HTTP-native. Uses the same 402 pattern as x402, so agents can support both protocols on the same endpoints.

Where Subscriptions Complement x402

ERC-8162 and x402 are complementary. An agent can support both, choosing the right model for each use case. Subscriptions bring specific advantages for ongoing access relationships.

Zero cost per request

x402 settles payments at request time, which is ideal for transactional use cases. For agents handling high-frequency or multi-turn interactions, subscriptions offer a different trade-off: the payment happens once at subscription time, and after that, access verification is a local signature check (ecrecover) plus an optional onchain read. No gas per call, no per-request settlement overhead.

Self-contained verification

With subscriptions, the agent verifies access proofs locally using standard EIP-712 signature recovery. For high-throughput agents, a local event cache eliminates even the RPC call. The entire verification path is self-contained, which simplifies the architecture for agents that serve many requests per subscriber.

Predictable pricing for users

Subscriptions give users a clear, fixed cost for a billing period. This is particularly valuable for interactive, multi-turn use cases where the total number of requests is hard to predict in advance. Users pay once, then use the service freely within their plan tier. This is the same model used by Netflix, Spotify, GitHub, and ChatGPT.

Multi-turn conversations without compounding costs

Agent interactions are inherently multi-turn. A coding assistant might need 10 to 20 exchanges to debug a problem. A research agent might iterate on search queries. An advisory agent might ask clarifying questions before delivering a recommendation.

With x402, each exchange is a separate payment. The cost of a conversation scales linearly with its length, and neither party knows in advance how long it will be. With ERC-8162, the entire conversation (and every future conversation within the billing cycle) is covered by the subscription.

Agent-to-agent collaboration at scale

When agents collaborate, per-request billing creates a combinatorial cost problem. Agent A calls Agent B, which calls Agent C, each hop triggering a payment negotiation and settlement. The overhead grows with the depth of the call chain.

Subscriptions flatten this. Agent A subscribes to Agent B. Agent B subscribes to Agent C. After that, collaboration is frictionless. The payment relationships are pre-established and the cost is predictable.

Commercial Potential

For agent developers

Recurring revenue. Subscriptions create predictable, recurring income. Developers can plan infrastructure costs against known subscriber counts rather than volatile per-request volumes.
Tiered monetization. Multiple plan tiers (starter, pro, enterprise) let developers capture value across market segments. A free tier with a paid upgrade path is trivial to implement.
Zero billing infrastructure. The protocol handles everything. No Stripe integration, no invoice generation, no payment failure retry logic. Deploy the contract, create a plan, drop in the middleware.
Instant settlement. Payments arrive in the agent owner's wallet the moment a user subscribes. No 30-day net terms, no payment processor holdbacks.

For enterprises and integrators

SLA-compatible access. Subscription state is verifiable onchain. An enterprise can prove it has paid for access to an agent, and the agent can prove it has granted access, without relying on either party's internal records.
Audit trail. Every subscription, renewal, and cancellation is an onchain event. Compliance teams can verify payment history without requesting invoices.
Multi-chain flexibility. Agents can accept subscriptions on whichever chains their users prefer. A single agent can have subscribers paying on Base, Arbitrum, and Ethereum simultaneously.

For the ecosystem

Composability with ERC-8004. Plans are advertised in the agent card. Discovery, pricing, and subscription happen through a single standard flow. Agent directories and marketplaces can index plans automatically.
Composability with x402. Agents can offer subscriptions for regular users and x402 for occasional or anonymous access. The two protocols coexist on the same endpoints.
Open standard. ERC-8162 is a standard, not a product. Any chain, any agent framework, any wallet can implement it. No vendor lock-in, no platform fees, no gatekeepers.

The Bottom Line