The independent x402 Foundation officially began operations and assumed stewardship of the open x402 payment protocol. The initiative has attracted 40 companies from the financial services, cloud infrastructure, and payments sectors.
The Linux Foundation, a leading international organization supporting collaborative open source projects, announced the official launch of x402 Foundation, which will oversee the development of the open x402 payment protocol. At the same time, crypto exchange Coinbase, the protocol’s original developer, completed the transfer of the project to the foundation. The technology will now be developed under an open and independent governance model.
The x402 protocol embeds payment capabilities directly into HTTP interactions, allowing AI agents to send and receive payments automatically as they exchange data. The standard supports multiple payment methods, from bank cards to stablecoins, and is being developed as a universal solution that doesn’t depend on any single infrastructure provider.
Since the x402 Foundation was announced in April, the initiative has attracted 40 participants, including:
- Adyen;
- Amazon Web Services (AWS);
- American Express;
- Cardano Foundation;
- Circle;
- Cloudflare;
- Coinbase;
- Fireblocks;
- Fiserv;
- Google;
- KakaoPay;
- LayerZero Labs;
- Mastercard;
- Monad Foundation;
- MoonPay;
- NEAR Foundation;
- Polygon Labs;
- Ripple;
- Shopify;
- Solana Foundation;
- Stellar Development Foundation;
- Stripe;
- Visa, and others.
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said the foundation’s transition to full operations marked the next stage in the protocol’s development. He added that developers, financial institutions, and cloud infrastructure providers will be able to shape the standard’s future together while preserving its openness, interoperability, and independence from individual vendors.
Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Products at Coinbase, said x402 was designed to address the lack of a universal mechanism that enables AI agents to make native internet payments. According to him, transferring the protocol to the Linux Foundation will support its long term development as an industry standard.
Kevin Miller, Head of Payments at Stripe, said x402 will help businesses accept payments from AI agents while enabling those agents to become full participants in the digital economy. Markus Infanger, Senior Vice President of RippleX at Ripple, said open standards such as x402 provide the foundation for secure and interoperable payments between AI agents.
Autonomous AI agents have created a new segment of the digital payments market that according to analysts’ forecasts could grow to $5 trillion by 2030.
