Quicknode

June 9, 2026 — 3 min read

Starting June 9, x402 requests on Quicknode are free up to 1 million requests per month, per agent, across x402-enabled Quicknode services. The allowance refreshes every month.

How to claim the free tier

Three steps. Grab testnet USDC from the faucet at x402.quicknode.com/drip. Pay for requests with it via x402, the same way you would with mainnet USDC. That gives your agent read and write access to 140+ networks, including mainnets, with up to 1,000,000 requests per month, reset monthly.

How x402 works on Quicknode

x402 is an open payment standard from Coinbase that revives the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code and turns it into a working payment layer. On Quicknode, it means any application or AI agent with a wallet and a supported stablecoin can start making calls immediately. No account, no API keys, no dashboard.

A client signs a request with their wallet and pays in USDC. The Quicknode x402-enabled APIs handle the payment negotiation automatically through the client library, so the developer experience is simple: connect wallet, make a request. You can see the full flow in the x402 docs and follow our step-by-step guide to making your first x402 request.

One detail worth calling out: the chain you pay on and the chain you query don't have to match. You can pay with USDC on Base, Solana, or Polygon, or USDG on X Layer, and query any of Quicknode's 140+ supported networks. Same wallet, same flow, whatever chain you are reading. More payment networks are being added, since x402 is chain-agnostic by design.

Access spans all four protocols: JSON-RPC, REST, gRPC-Web, and WebSocket.

Three payment models, one wallet

x402 on Quicknode supports three models so teams can match access to their workload:

Pay-per-request. No authentication required. Each request carries a payment signature, handled automatically by the client. Best for lightweight and ephemeral access.

Nanopayments. Ultra-low-cost per-call payments, ideal for high-frequency agent traffic. Quicknode was a day-one partner for Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway, bringing gas-free USDC payments down to fractions of a cent.

Credit drawdown. Authenticate once, buy a bundle of credits with USDC, then draw down on each request. Better economics for sustained usage.

Built alongside the USDC ecosystem

This launch is built hand in hand with the USDC ecosystem, including Circle and Arc. x402 payments on Quicknode using Solana, Base, and Polygon settle in USDC, from single requests to Nanopayments. Stablecoin-native access to onchain data, built for the agent economy.

And when an agent is ready to do more than read chain state, it can create a full Quicknode account and provision infrastructure in a single request, no dashboard or human handoff required.

Get started

Connect a wallet and make your first call in minutes. The client packages handle the payment flow for you, on both EVM chains and Solana.

x402 on Quicknode is currently in alpha. It complements our standard plans rather than replacing them, so production workloads still get the SLAs, support, and billing they rely on. We reserve the right to revoke the free tier for wallets that abuse the system.