Coinbases x402 Payment Protocol Moves to Linux Foundation With Backing From Google, Stripe, and Visa

The open standard for embedding payments into HTTP interactions aims to become the settlement layer for AI agent commerce, with over 20 founding members spanning tech, payments and crypto.

The x402 protocol, Coinbases open standard for embedding stablecoin payments directly into web interactions, has officially moved to the Linux Foundation as the newly launched x402 Foundation opens its doors with a broad coalition of industry heavyweights.

The announcement, made Thursday at the MCP Dev Summit North America, marks the protocols transition from a Coinbase-led project to a vendor-neutral, community-governed standard designed to accelerate adoption as AI agents increasingly need to pay for services autonomously.

The foundations initial governing body includes Cloudflare and Stripe, and founding members include Adyen, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ampersend.ai, Ant International, Base, Circle, Fiserv Merchant Solutions, Google, KakaoPay, Mastercard, Merit Systems, Microsoft, Polygon Labs, PPRO, Sierra, Shopify, Solana Foundation, Thirdweb and Visa.

From HTTP Error Code to Payment Layer

The x402 protocol revives HTTPs long-dormant “402 Payment Required” status code, turning it into a functional payment handshake. When an AI agent requests a paid resource, the server responds with a 402 status containing machine-readable price and settlement details. The client signs a payment payload and retries the request, and a facilitator verifies and settles the transaction on-chain.

The design supports both fiat and crypto payment methods across multiple blockchains.

The launch comes as the race to build the internet‘s AI payment layer intensifies. x402 faces competition from the Machine Payments Protocol, developed by Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo blockchain, which uses session-based authentication rather than x402s per-request model.

Google has already integrated x402 into its Agentic Payments Protocol as the default stablecoin rail. The surrounding infrastructure is also expanding: MoonPay last week released the Open Wallet Standard for AI agent wallet interactions, Visa launched its CLI payment tool targeting agent commerce, and Circle built its Nanopayments directly on x402 for sub-cent USDC transactions.