Coinbase and Cloudflare announced the creation of the x402 Foundation on Tuesday, calling it a new governance body designed to advance payment integration directly into the internet’s core protocols.
The initiative builds on the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code, historically unused, to enable the x402 protocol—an approach embedding payments into web interactions. The move is intended to reduce friction in digital transactions and lay the groundwork for agent-driven commerce across AI systems, APIs, and applications.
The x402 protocol is gaining momentum among developers and enterprises experimenting with pay-per-use models. Early pilots include per-request access to artificial intelligence models, on-demand data streams, micropayments for creators, and pay-as-you-go storage and content delivery.
By standardizing these interactions, x402 could allow machine-to-machine transactions—sometimes described as “agentic commerce”—to scale in ways that legacy payment rails have struggled to support.
The x402 Foundation aims to ensure the standard remains open and neutral. Its governance model is expected to encourage contributions across the ecosystem, preventing fragmentation as adoption widens.
