The x402 Foundation is moving the x402 agentic payments protocol, incubated by Coinbase, to the Linux Foundation, according to an announcement on Thursday. 

With the move, many high-profile tech, crypto, and finance firms will begin contributing to the stewardship of x402. This includes Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ant International, Base, Circle, Google, KakaoPay, Mastercard, Microsoft, Polygon Labs, Shopify, Solana Foundation, and Visa, among others. 

Coinbase initially established the x402 Foundation with support from Cloudflare and Stripe, which will remain active in the expanded and reformed organization. 

To some extent, the new structure is meant to reflect the principles of the x402 protocol, which is designed as an open and neutral system for internet payments. Under Linux Foundation governance, the x402 protocol is set to remain vendor neutral, per the announcement.

"The internet was built on open protocols," said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. "The x402 Foundation will create an open, community-governed home to develop these capabilities in the open, ensuring they evolve with transparency, interoperability, and broad participation across the ecosystem."

The x402 protocol was named after the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, a blank space that the internet's original architects planned to fill with a native payments system.  

The Linux Foundation acts as a sort of umbrella organization for other entities that oversee free and open-source (FOSS) software, allowing them to maintain independent governance and funding setups, like the Hyperledger Foundation, which fosters blockchain projects Fabric and Besu, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts the foundational Kubernetes platform. 

Agentic payments

The x402 protocol is one among an emerging set of open source standards designed to facilitate the nascent agentic economy. Last month, Stripe and Tempo also released the Machine Payments Protocol, while Visa rolled out a command-line payments tool for bots. 

"Stripe is building financial infrastructure for the agentic commerce era, and open protocols are an important part of creating a thriving ecosystem. We're looking forward to collaborating with the x402 community to help businesses accept payments from agents at scale," Stripe Business Lead Kevin Miller said.

Over the past year, Coinbase has gradually improved x402 to make it increasingly AI-friendly, including tools to give agents wallets, as well as technologically neutral. The protocol supports not only crypto transactions via Base, Polygon and Solana, but also legacy channels like credit cards, ACH, and bank rails.

While x402 has at times seen spikes of activity, the protocol typically sees daily transaction volumes measured in the tens of thousands, The Block's data shows.

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