The stakes are high because AI agents, which will likely account for a large share of Internet commerce, some of them in the form of small micropayments, could completely reshape the Web. “It may seem silly to worry so much about standards, but we have an opportunity to create this truly open, public, global financial system that everyone can access,” Dixon added.
Other notable members of the x402 Foundation include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, along with Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation.
Coinbase initially led 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 unviable, and Internet business models evolved through advertising and subscriptions, leaving the 402 gateway unused.
Putting x402 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is exactly the right “open source playing field” required to build a collaborative open standard, according to Alin Dragos, senior manager of AWS Payments, who has taken on the role of chair of the x402 Foundation board of directors.
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.
