An open protocol for media: people and agents on the same rails.
WAVE is a published, versioned contract for live and on-demand media: one call shape across every transport. Integrate once; autonomous agents discover the same surface and settle for media access natively over HTTP-402. The surfaces below are the protocol: documented, discoverable, and implementable.
What WAVE speaks
39 live transports, protocols, and codecs · 3 on the roadmap
One call shape in front; the full media stack behind it. Ingest from anywhere, deliver everywhere, protect it, caption it, and let agents negotiate access over HTTP.
The protocol surfaces
OpenAPI contract
One typed API contract for every WAVE product. Generate a client in any language; the same contract serves people and agents.
HTTP-402 payment negotiation (x402)
Resources can demand payment with an HTTP 402 response; agents settle programmatically and retry. Discovery lives at /.well-known/x402; enforcement is at the WAVE gateway.
Agent skill descriptors
Machine-readable skill manifests let autonomous systems discover what WAVE can do and how to call it. No docs to read.
Agent commerce (x402 + MPP)
Every WAVE capability is payable by an autonomous agent over HTTP-402 (x402) and the Machine Payments Protocol: Base mainnet settlement, sanctions screening, pay-per-use, no account. Every product is payable this way from day one; WAVE Dispatch publishes its live terms as the public exemplar.
Gateway enforcement plane
A single edge gateway enforces authentication, scope, entitlement, and metering. Every product and every agent goes through the same plane: the protocol's trust boundary.
WAVE is an open protocol in the sense that the contract is published, versioned, and implementable against the surfaces above. It is not an independently ratified standards-body specification, and it does not claim multiple third-party implementations. The protocol is operated by WAVE Online, LLC.