Big Tech has thrown its weight behind a new industry body aiming to make AI-driven payments work the same way across crypto and traditional rails.
The Linux Foundation on Thursday announced the launch of the x402 Foundation, a governance initiative centered on the x402 protocol. Early backers include Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and the project was developed with input from Coinbase — the company that first introduced the x402 protocol. Financial and blockchain names lining up behind the effort include American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Circle, Solana Foundation and Polygon Labs. Infrastructure and commerce players such as Cloudflare and Shopify, developer platforms like Thirdweb, and regional payments firm KakaoPay have also signaled support.
Coinbase framed the move as putting the protocol in a “neutral, nonprofit home” that could help attract broader tech and developer participation compared with keeping it under a single company banner. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, argued the approach mirrors how the internet evolved: “the internet was built on open protocols,” he said, making the case for a shared standard for AI-driven payments.
What is x402? The protocol is designed as an open standard that lets AI agents and web services execute payments autonomously — paying for APIs, accessing paid data, or buying digital services without human intervention. Proponents see this as a building block for machine-to-machine commerce, where AI agents transact on behalf of users or services.
Momentum for that vision is being voiced loudly by industry figures. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently predicted “there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon,” and Circle’s Jeremy Allaire has forecast “literally billions of AI agents” could be active on-chain within a few years. Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has also described crypto as potentially the “native currency for AI agents,” especially for automated, recurring payments.
But backing from big names hasn’t yet translated into steady, high-volume usage. Dune Analytics shows a spike in x402 activity late last year — weekly transactions hit about 13.7 million in the week of Nov. 4–10 and 13.66 million the following week — before falling away. So far in 2026 weekly volumes have been uneven, ranging roughly from 29,000 to 1.1 million, signaling that adoption remains inconsistent despite the high-profile coalition now supporting the protocol.
The x402 Foundation’s launch under the Linux Foundation is intended to accelerate standardization and developer adoption. Whether that will be enough to turn episodic bursts of activity into sustained machine-to-machine payment flows remains the central question for the next phase of crypto-enabled AI commerce.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
