Linux Foundation forms x402 governance body with 40 members
AI & Agents ·
A new foundation under the Linux Foundation will oversee x402, the HTTP-based payment standard, with Visa, Mastercard and Ripple among its 40 founding participants.
The Linux Foundation has stood up formal governance for x402, an open standard that lets web servers and software settle stablecoin payments directly through ordinary HTTP requests rather than external checkout systems. Forty organizations have joined as members of the new body, including payments giants Visa and Mastercard alongside Ripple, according to cryptopotato.com. Ripple's involvement extends a separate push announced around the same period, when the company paired a veteran employment partnership with its entry into the x402 Foundation to help build open-source tooling for AI-driven payments.
The mechanism at the center of x402 repurposes the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" code, a response status that was reserved decades ago but never put into practical use. Instead of routing transactions through card forms, subscription paywalls or API-key systems, x402 lets a client, a server, and sometimes a facilitator agree on a price and confirm settlement as part of the request itself, using assets such as USDC. That design is built specifically for machines: AI agents and automated services can pay per request without a human clicking through a checkout page.
Adoption has moved quickly since the protocol's debut. Within about a year, it has handled on the order of hundreds of millions of agent-driven payments, with more than ninety percent of that activity settling on Coinbase's Base network, and the mix of transactions has shifted from small experimental payments toward larger transfers. Coinbase has since added usage-based pricing for AI agents even as weekly transaction counts fell 99% from their peak, while Base has said agents are already spending millions of dollars through x402 on tasks like search, scraping, browser automation and data retrieval. Coinbase has also extended the standard with universal ERC-20 support for gasless payments across EVM chains and brought x402 payments to AWS CloudFront and WAF, infrastructure that touches roughly a quarter of the web.
Other ecosystems are joining the buildout as well: Exa AI launched on Solana to let agents pay for web and content search with USDC without needing accounts or API keys, and the Monad Foundation joined the x402 Foundation to link HTTP-native agent payments with DeFi. What remains unclear is how the new 40-member governance structure will set technical priorities across such a broad and fast-growing set of participants, and whether transaction volume can sustain growth after the sharp weekly drop already reported.