The stakes are high because AI agents, which will likely account for a significant share of internet commerce, including in the form of tiny micropayments, could completely reshape the web. “It may seem corny to worry so much about standards, but we have the opportunity to create this truly open public global financial system that everyone can access,” Dixon added.
Other core members of the x402 Foundation include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation.
Coinbase initially spearheaded the x402 payment protocol, which takes its name from the “402 payment required” response code created by the early architects of the World Wide Web to allow browsers to pay for content.
However, card payments and associated fees made micropayments impossible, and Internet business models evolved through advertising and subscriptions, leaving the 402 gateway unused.
Placing x402 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is exactly the right “open source playground” to create an open, collaborative standard, according to Alin Dragos, senior director at AWS Payments, who has taken on the role of chair of the x402 Foundation board.
The plan, Dragos said, is to complement the original design of HTTP, the fundamental set of rules that allows web browsers and servers to communicate.
