A group of major financial and technology companies, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, and Coinbase, have established the x402 Foundation to create an open standard for AI-driven commerce and payments across the internet.
Industry leaders unite for open payments protocol
The x402 Foundation aims to provide a neutral platform where competitors and various payment methods can collaborate to develop the x402 protocol, a payments standard enabling transactions between AI agents, machines, and humans through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Foundation membership now includes over 40 organizations such as Ripple, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Circle, MoonPay, and the Solana Foundation, in addition to the founding partners. These companies represent a wide cross-section of payments, e-commerce, blockchain, and cloud computing sectors.
The initiative follows lessons from the early internet era, with participants stressing the importance of avoiding restrictive “walled gardens” in financial systems. By embracing open-source principles, the foundation wants to ensure access and interoperability for future AI-enabled commerce.
Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, initially developed the x402 protocol. The protocol’s name is inspired by the “402 Payment Required” HTTP response code, designed in the internet’s early days to allow browsers to process payments for online content.
Mini dictionary: x402 Foundation, a nonprofit group launched to promote and steward an open payments protocol that facilitates transactions between AI agents, humans, and machines using standard internet protocols.
Technical direction and governance
Alin Dragos, senior manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Payments, serves as board chairperson of the x402 Foundation. The group has started the search for an executive director and has already formed a technical steering committee to begin protocol development and oversight.
Dragos described bringing the project under the Linux Foundation as the right environment for collaborative, open-source standards-building. He said the x402 protocol aims to extend the original design of HTTP, allowing not just information, but value and payments, to move seamlessly across the internet.
“We solved the problem whereby participants on the internet can exchange information, but we don’t actually have a good way to exchange value. In order to build a standard, you need many competitors and payment methods to come and work together and it’s important to have this neutral ground to pave the way for agents to transact on behalf of people,” Dragos emphasized.
Foundation members believe AI agents could soon facilitate a significant portion of online transactions, including micropayments, and want standards in place before mass adoption. They argue that blockchain technology has resolved the underlying payment infrastructure, but integration with agentic models and internet standards now needs collective focus.
| Member Company | Sector |
|---|---|
| Visa | Payments |
| Mastercard | Payments |
| American Express | Payments |
| Stripe | Payments |
| Coinbase | Cryptocurrency Exchange |
| Ripple | Blockchain/Payments |
| Google, AWS, Cloudflare | Cloud/Technology |
| Shopify | E-commerce |
| Circle, MoonPay, Solana Foundation | Crypto/Blockchain |
Developing a global payments ecosystem
Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, highlighted the economic opportunities made possible through agentic payments and open standards: “You don’t want to be in a walled garden when you’re dealing with money.” He believes that creating a global, public financial system accessibly managed by diverse entities is a historic opportunity.
Advocates say the x402 protocol could allow users and machines to make one-off payments for content or services without relying on subscriptions or repeatedly entering payment details. While large-scale implementation has not yet occurred, participants expect adoption to grow steadily as merchant and agent integrations expand.
Dixon stated, “There’s a lot of different, really interesting opportunities that come from this. Blockchain has already solved the issue of the underlying payment infrastructure of the web, but now it’s actually really working because of this agentic piece. It’s being used, perhaps not at scale yet. But it will.”
Since the foundation’s launch just three months ago, membership and momentum have increased rapidly. The group sees these early milestones as a strong sign for their vision of inclusive and standardized AI-driven internet payments.
