Visa, Mastercard and Ripple back x402 as agent payments average 32 cents
The Linux Foundation has formalized governance for the x402 protocol, a payment standard backed by major financial and tech firms like Visa, Mastercard, and Google. The protocol enables machine-to-machine micro-payments, allowing autonomous AI agents to conduct transactions without traditional banking infrastructure.
Why it matters
The x402 protocol solves a long-standing technical hurdle for the AI economy by facilitating efficient, low-cost automated payments between machines.
The Linux Foundation said Tuesday that the x402 Foundation is now operating under formal governance with 40 members, and that Coinbase's contribution of the protocol is complete.
Premier members include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana and Stellar foundations.
The protocol fills in a thirty-year-old loose end. When the web's architects wrote the rules for how browsers and servers talk to each other, they set aside a response code numbered ‘402’ and labeled it "Payment Required," expecting someone would eventually build payments into the web itself.
Card fees made charging a fraction of a cent pointless, so the web eventually monetized through ads, subscriptions and API keys instead, and 402 sat unused.
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