What is arbitrum-x402-aws?

This project is a working demonstration of an AI agent paying for content automatically using cryptocurrency, built on AWS and the Arbitrum blockchain. It shows how a piece of software running on Amazon's Bedrock AgentCore can encounter a paywall, pay for access on the spot using real digital money, and get the content it asked for, all without a human clicking anything. The setup has two main pieces. The first is a merchant server built on AWS CloudFront and Lambda@Edge that guards a piece of gated content. When someone requests it without paying, the server replies with an HTTP 402 Payment Required response, which is a real but rarely used web standard for exactly this situation. The second piece is a Python agent that holds its own digital wallet, created and managed through AWS Bedrock AgentCore. When the agent hits that 402 response, it automatically signs a payment using its embedded wallet and resends the request with proof of payment attached. Behind the scenes, the actual payment settles as USDC, a dollar pegged cryptocurrency, on the Arbitrum One blockchain, verified and processed through Coinbase's CDP payment facilitator service. The whole exchange, request, payment demand, signed payment, and verified access, happens automatically in a few network round trips, and the agent gets back the gated data along with a link to view the transaction on a blockchain explorer. The repo is organized as a small monorepo with a TypeScript merchant app, a Python agent app, and a shared TypeScript package defining the payment protocol types and Arbitrum specific constants. Deployment uses the AWS CDK for infrastructure and a Makefile that walks through installing dependencies, deploying the merchant, setting up the agent's wallet, and running the agent end to end. It includes 26 automated tests across both the TypeScript and Python halves of the project, and is released under the MIT license.