The stakes are high because AI agents, which will likely 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 nerdy to care about standards so much, but we have the opportunity to create this truly open public global financial system that everyone can have access to,” Dixon added.
Other premier members of the x402 Foundation include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation.
Coinbase initially 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 unworkable, and business models on the internet 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 the role of board chairperson to the x402 Foundation.
The plan, Dragos said, is to complement the original design of HTTP, the foundational set of rules that allows web browsers and servers to communicate.