The stakes are high because AI agents, which are likely to account for a large portion of internet commerce, some of it in the form of tiny micropayments, could completely reshape the web. “It may seem geeky to care 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 leading 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 originally shepherded the x402 payment protocol, which takes its name from the “402 Payment Required” response code built by early World Wide Web architects to allow browsers to pay for content.
However, card payments and the associated fees made micropayments useless, and internet business models evolved through advertising and subscriptions, leaving the 402 gateway unused.
Bringing x402 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is exactly the right “open source playground” required for a collaborative open standard to be built, according to Alin Dragos, senior manager at AWS Payments, who has taken on the role of chairman of the x402 Foundation.
The plan, Dragos said, is to complement the original design of HTTP, the basic set of rules that allow web browsers and servers to communicate.
