Forty global leaders have launched the x402 Foundation, establishing an open HTTP standard for autonomous AI agent payments.
The operational launch of the x402 Foundation was announced on Tuesday, 14 July 2026 out of San Francisco. The Linux Foundation acts as the parent non-profit organisation providing the vendor-neutral governance structure for the newly formed x402 Foundation. The foundation stewards the x402 protocol, a standard designed to embed payment capabilities directly over HTTP. This allows autonomous AI agents, APIs, and applications to process financial transactions programmatically during standard web request/response cycles as they exchange data.
The x402 protocol code and framework were initially developed and contributed to the Linux Foundation by Coinbase to address machine-to-machine transaction boundaries. The standard is payment-agnostic, supporting asset types ranging from credit/debit cards to stablecoins (such as USDC) and layer-1 native cryptocurrencies (such as XRP, Solana, or Bitcoin), allowing machine-to-machine settlements at fractions of a cent.
The alliance consists of 40 member simple organisations spanning traditional finance tech, cloud infrastructure, and Web3 entities: Premier Members include Adyen, AWS, American Express, Circle, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Fiserv, Google, Mastercard, Monad, MoonPay, Ripple, Shopify, Solana, Stellar, Stripe and Visa, while General and Associate Members include networks and fintech firms such as Aleo, Fireblocks, Injective, KakaoPay, Kite AI, LayerZero Labs, NEAR, Polygon, World Liberty Financial and the Cardano Foundation.
Executives noted that while AI agents book travel, manage inventory, and purchase compute, the infrastructure of the web lacked a native mechanism for one software programme to authenticate and pay another. The open-governance model prevents any single corporation from holding an intellectual property monopoly on machine-to-machine commerce.
