Toronto, October 2026 — Qatom, the commerce layer that turns APIs and data into storefronts AI agents can buy from, today set out its answer to the growing trust problem in agent payments.
In 2026 AWS, Stripe, Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard all launched ways to give AI agents a wallet. Open protocols such as x402 showed that software can pay software over a plain web request. The next question is harder: can a business trust the payment when an agent is on the other end?
Independent research says the market is not there yet:
- Volume is mostly noise. Visa and Artemis put adjusted x402 volume at roughly $15M through April 21, 2026, across about 109.6M transactions, an average of about $0.14 a payment. TRM Labs estimates that only 0.6% to 7.5% of screened x402 commerce came from AI agents. (Forkast; Decrypt)
- Payments can fail after delivery. A July 2026 study accepted to USENIX Security 2026 found 49 security-rule violations across 15 x402 payment facilitators, which together cover about 99% of observed x402 transactions, including ways to get services without paying. The affected parties have since adopted fixes, including Coinbase. (arXiv; USENIX)
- No one owns the outcome. Checking a payment does not lock the funds, and refunds and disputes have no owner. (Four Pillars)
What Qatom does differently
Qatom ties payment, delivery and the record into one transaction, so a seller is never asked to deliver first and hope to be paid.
- Settled in the call. The payment and the service land together, in under a second.
- Proof that travels with the money. Each payment carries its own ownership and history, so it can be verified locally, even offline, with no public ledger.
- Hard spend limits. Every agent wallet carries a budget that stops spending the moment it runs out.
- One receipt per call. Each transaction creates a single record linking the request, the decision and the payment.
- 0% transaction fees, no gas. Sellers keep 100% of every sale and pay a flat subscription.
Qatom is built for regulated sellers: banks, data owners, healthcare and defence suppliers who need private, on-premise or air-gapped deployment that public-chain rails cannot offer.
Proof in production
Qatom has processed more than 100,000 payments in production for customers selling APIs, data and media to AI agents.
“The industry proved that agents will pay. Now it has to prove those payments can be trusted. Builders shouldn’t have to choose between an open protocol and a guarantee. Qatom gives sellers both: every call is paid, delivered and recorded together, and nothing about their business sits on a public ledger.”Hassan Khan, CEO, Qatom
About Qatom
Qatom turns any API, dataset or digital service into an agentic storefront that humans and AI agents can find, buy from and pay per call. Qatom has been in production since 2023, on infrastructure built on the TODA File Protocol and the ADOT Protocol: every payment carries its own cryptographic proof of ownership and history, verifiable anywhere, with no public ledger.
Sellers start free at qatom.ai.
Media contact
Sources
- Forkast: Visa and Artemis, the $0.14 reality of agent commerce (Jul 2026)
- Decrypt: TRM Labs research on x402 and AI agent payments (Sep 2026)
- Wang, Yang, Chen, Ji and Payer: When HTTP 402 Meets the Blockchain (arXiv 2607.19545, Jul 2026; USENIX Security 2026)
- Four Pillars Research: Centralized responsibility is all x402 needs (Jul 2026)
- CoinDesk: demand is not there yet (Mar 2026)
- Qatom guide: x402 in 2026, real volume and security research