Coinbase’s AI payments system joins Linux Foundation, gathers support from Google, Stripe, AWS and others
The Coinbase-engineered agentic commerce protocol x402 has garnered support from a long list of big names like Google, Cloudflare and Stripe.
What to know:
- An initial governing body, the x402 Foundation, includes internet services firm Cloudflare and payments giant Stripe, with support from a long list of other big players.
- The open-source consortium also includes initial intent and support being expressed by the likes of Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ant International,Visa and Microsoft.
The protocol has formed an initial governing body, the x402 Foundation, that includes internet services firm Cloudflare and payments giant Stripe, with support from a long list of other big players.
The industry interest in X402 comes as AI-driven commerce expands. Especially, so-called agentic payments, executed autonomously by AI agents, is a hot topic particularly within certain areas of the crypto industry where the belief is that programmable, blockchain-based micro-payments make the most sense.
x402 is designed for these payments. Unlike using ChatGPT as a front-end for a traditional shopping cart, it can handle transactions worth only fractions of a cent at high frequency — something traditional credit card networks struggle to manage.
Now, by using the Linux Foundation to scale an open-source ecosystem, x402 aims to tackle potential interoperability issues by creating something like a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for AI agents, in other words a standard technology that encrypts the connection between a web server and a browser.
