P402 Router serves as a routing control plane for x402 payments, sitting between paid endpoints and facilitators to handle payment routing, verification, and settlement at scale. It enables enforcement of spend controls and settlement in USDC while publishing Bazaar-ready metadata.

The product offers smart routing to select the best path per request based on facilitator health and cost, along with policy enforcement for budgets, caps, rate limits, and route scopes. It provides observability through traces and failure analysis, Bazaar overlays for machine-readable metadata, and money analytics to measure payment conversion rates.

P402 Router works by evaluating request context, selecting an accept option, routing verify and settle operations, and recording a decision trace for each attempt. It uses HTTP 402 with PAYMENT-REQUIRED and PAYMENT-SIGNATURE headers, following a four-step flow from buyer request through payment verification and settlement.

The benefits include enabling pay-per-call APIs without subscriptions, charging per tool invocation for MCP servers, gating spend and domains for agent-to-agent interactions, and facilitating internal chargeback between services. It provides safe defaults with role-based access, key rotation, least-privilege secrets, and audit logs.

The product targets developers building paid APIs and agent stacks, specifically for pay-per-call APIs, MCP servers, agent-to-agent interactions, and internal chargeback systems. It integrates with Base blockchain and supports USDC payments with EIP-3009 compliance.