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How an agent pays for video

2026-06-08 · WAVE · 6 min read

Most video APIs assume a person is behind the request: someone signed up, added a card, and holds a key. WAVE keeps that path for people, and adds a second one for agents. An agent can call the same routes, get a price, pay per use, and continue — without an account and without a human in the loop.

This post walks the request end to end.

The two engines

WAVE is built around two jobs.

  • The Media Engine moves the video. One open API ingests and delivers across transports — RTMP, SRT, NDI, Dante, OMT, MoQ, WebRTC, HLS. Every transport is a thin adapter over the same core.
  • The Money Engine gets everyone paid. It prices a call, settles the payment, and meters usage. For agents, settlement runs over x402.

A person reaches the Media Engine with a bearer key. An agent reaches the same Media Engine, but the Money Engine meets it first.

x402, in one paragraph

x402 is HTTP's 402 Payment Required put to work. An agent makes a request. If the route is metered and unpaid, WAVE answers 402 with a small, machine-readable description of the price and how to pay. The agent pays, retries the request with proof of payment, and the call goes through. No checkout page, no stored card, no session. The payment is part of the protocol, not a side channel.

WAVE's x402 facilitator is live on Base mainnet today.

The path a request takes

  1. The agent discovers what it can pay for at /.well-known/x402 on api.wave.online.
  2. It calls a metered route — say, to start a delivery or pull a clip.
  3. WAVE returns 402 with the price and payment details.
  4. The agent settles the amount on Base and retries with proof.
  5. WAVE verifies, runs the call through the Media Engine, and meters the usage.

$0 to start, no account required. The agent pays only for what it uses.

Who is calling: did:wave

A payment is only useful if you know who paid. WAVE gives each agent an identity with did:wave — a decentralized identifier the agent presents alongside its payment. Requests are sanctions-screened. That keeps the open path open without making it anonymous in a way that breaks compliance.

Why this matters

For a person, the value is familiar: one API, one key, every transport. For an agent, the value is new. An agent that can find a price, pay it, and act does not need a human to provision access first. That is the difference between an API a person operates and an API an agent can use on its own.

People call WAVE with a key. Agents call the same routes and settle the bill themselves. Both reach the same Media Engine.

Try it

Several WAVE sub-products are in preview and labeled as such. The gateway, the docs, and the x402 facilitator are live.