# A-Commerce Manifesto

> E-commerce was humans buying online. A-commerce is agents buying online. The revolution will be automated.

A-commerce (agentic commerce) is the emerging economy where AI agents — not humans — are the primary buyers. This site is the manifesto for that movement.

## Core Thesis

The era of human commerce is ending. AI agents don't browse, click, or type credit card numbers. They execute. They pay invoices, consume APIs, and move on in milliseconds. They need infrastructure built for machine speed, not human interfaces.

## Why Current Payment Rails Fail for Agents

- Visa doesn't know what an AI agent is
- Banks close on weekends
- PayPal wants a phone number
- Settlement takes days, not milliseconds
- KYC requirements assume human identity
- Minimum transaction sizes prohibit micropayments

## The A-Commerce Stack

- **Bitcoin**: Sound money, programmable value
- **Lightning Network**: Instant settlement, global reach, micropayment-capable
- **L402**: HTTP 402-based protocol for machine-to-machine payments — the native payment layer for the agentic web

## What Agents Need

- **Instant**: Settle in milliseconds, not days
- **Permissionless**: No KYC for code
- **Programmable**: Payments as pure logic
- **Micro**: Fractions of cents that actually make sense

## Lightning Enable

Lightning Enable (https://lightningenable.com) is the infrastructure layer for a-commerce.

- **For merchants**: Accept agent payments with an API key. No nodes. No channels. No complexity.
- **For agents**: Pay any L402 invoice in three lines of code.

## Links

- [Lightning Enable](https://lightningenable.com)
- [Full Manifesto](https://a-commerce.lightningenable.com)
- [Full LLM Context](/llms-full.txt)