Inside the high-stakes race to build an open financial system specifically for AI bots

The stakes are high because AI agents, which will likely account for a large share of internet commerce, including some in the form of tiny micropayments, could completely reshape the web. “It may seem nerdy to care about standards so much, but we have the opportunity to create this truly open public global financial system that everyone can have access to,” Dixon added.

Other premier members of the x402 Foundation include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation.

Coinbase initially shepherded the x402 payment protocol, which takes its name from the “402 payment required” response code built by early World Wide Web architects to allow browsers to pay for content.

However, card payments and the associated fees made micropayments unworkable, and internet business models evolved through advertising and subscriptions, leaving the 402 gateway unused.

Bringing x402 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is exactly the right “open-source playground” for building a collaborative open standard, according to Alin Dragos, senior manager at AWS Payments, who has taken on the role of board chairperson for the x402 Foundation.

The plan, Dragos said, is to complement the original design of HTTP, the foundational set of rules that allows web browsers and servers to communicate.

“We solved the problem whereby participants on the internet can exchange information, but we don’t actually have a good way to exchange value,” Dragos said in an interview. “In order to build a standard, you need many competitors and payment methods to come and work together, and it’s important to have this neutral ground to pave the way for agents to transact on behalf of people.”

Dragos said the search for an x402 Foundation executive director is now underway, and the group has established a technical steering committee. “We also increased the number of members, which is a pretty good sign so for a foundation that’s about three months old just became operational, we feel like we’re in a pretty good spot,” he said.

AI agents don’t pay attention to advertising, which will ultimately drive foundational change to the way the internet currently operates, Dixon of Stellar highlighted in a recent blogpost.

“So now maybe content can just be paid for in a one-off model,” Dixon said.

“Blockchain has already solved the issue of the underlying payment infrastructure of the web, but now it’s actually really working because of this agentic piece. It’s being used, perhaps not at scale yet. But it will,” she added.