Visa, MasterCard and Coinbase jointly form the x402 Foundation to develop AI payment standards

Visa, MasterCard, Coinbase and other giants jointly established the x402 Foundation to promote AI payment standards.

A group of financial and technology giants, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Stripe and Coinbase, have jointly established the x402 Foundation, aiming to create an open standard for artificial intelligence-driven commerce and payments on the Internet.

Industry leaders join hands to create an open payment protocol

The x402 Foundation is committed to providing a neutral platform for competitors and various payment methods to collaborate to jointly develop the x402 protocol-a payment standard that enables transactions between artificial intelligence agents, machines and humans through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

In addition to founding partners, the foundation currently includes more than 40 institutions, including Ripple, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Cloud Services, Cloudflare, Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation. These companies broadly represent diverse forces in the fields of payments, e-commerce, blockchain and cloud computing.

The initiative draws on lessons from the early Internet era, with participants emphasizing the importance of avoiding the creation of closed "walled gardens" in the financial system. By embracing open source principles, the foundation hopes to ensure accessibility and interoperability for future AI businesses.

Coinbase, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, originally developed the x402 protocol. The name of the protocol comes from the early design of the Internet's "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code, which was once designed to allow browsers to process payments for online content.

Technical direction and management architecture

Alin Dragos, senior manager of Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) payments business, serves as chairman of the x402 Foundation's board of directors. The organization has begun recruiting executive directors and established a technical steering committee to develop and supervise the agreement.

Dragos said placing the project under the Linux Foundation provides an ideal environment for collaborative open source standard construction. He pointed out that the x402 protocol aims to extend the original design of HTTP, not only allowing the free flow of information, but also allowing value and payments to be seamlessly transferred over the Internet.

"We solved the problem of exchanging information between Internet participants, but there is actually no good way to exchange value. Building standards requires multiple competitors and payment methods to work together, and it is crucial to have such a neutral platform to pave the way for agents to conduct transactions on behalf of humans." Dragos emphasized.

Foundation members believe that artificial intelligence agents will soon enable a large number of online transactions, including micropayments, and hope to set standards before large-scale application. They said blockchain technology has solved the underlying payment infrastructure problem, but now a common focus is needed on integrating agent models with Internet standards.

Member Company Coverage Areas

Payment Areas: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv
Cryptocurrency and blockchain: Coinbase (exchange), Ripple (blockchain/payments), Circle, MoonPay, Solana Foundation
Cloud Services and Technology: Google, Amazon Cloud Services, Cloudflare
E-commerce: Shopify

Building a Global Payments Ecosystem

Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam highlighted the economic opportunities presented by proxy payments and open standards: "When it comes to money, you never want to be stuck in a walled garden." He believes that creating a global, public financial system managed by multiple entities is a historic opportunity.

Advocates say the x402 protocol allows users or machines to make one-time payments for content or services without relying on subscriptions or repeatedly entering payment information. Although large-scale deployment has not yet been achieved, participants expect adoption rates to grow steadily as merchant and agent integration expands.

Dixon said: "This will bring many different and really interesting opportunities. Blockchain has solved the problem of the underlying payment infrastructure of the network, but now it is really starting to come into play with the proxy link. It is being used, maybe not yet at scale, but it will happen."

Since the foundation was established three months ago, the number of members and momentum have grown rapidly. The organization sees these early milestones as a strong signal for its vision of inclusive, standardized artificial intelligence-driven Internet payments.