40 Finance and Tech Giants Unite to Standardize Agentic Payments

The x402 protocol, an open standard designed to support agentic payments, has a new open-governance body that includes 40 organizations.

The launch of the x402 Foundation was announced by the Linux Foundation in a Tuesday (July 14) press release.

The x402 Foundation is dedicated to building an open, vendor-neutral payment standard over HTTP and standardizing internet-native payments for AI agents and applications, according to the release.

The organization will allow developers, financial institutions, cloud providers and other community members to help shape the development of the protocol, the release said.

Its founding members include finance, cloud infrastructure and payments firms. Among the 40 members are 17 premier members, including Adyen, Amazon Web Services (AWS), American Express, Circle, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Fiserv, Google, Mastercard, Monad Foundation, MoonPay, Ripple, Shopify, Solana Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Stripe and Visa, per the release.

“The operational launch of the x402 Foundation marks a vital milestone in establishing an open, community-governed standard for payments over HTTP,” Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin said in the release. “By bringing together leading companies across finance, technology and more, we’re ensuring that the payment layer of the internet remains neutral, highly interoperable and ready to support digital commerce.”

Coinbase created the x402 protocol and introduced it in May 2025, describing it as an open standard that employs the original HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code to embed stablecoin payments into web interactions. The company said this approach would support autonomous AI agents, stablecoins and instant, frictionless payments native to the internet.

In April, Coinbase and the Linux Foundation announced that the x402 protocol was moving to the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on open source, and that the Linux Foundation was launching the x402 Foundation.

In the Tuesday press release announcing the founding members of the new open-governance body, Coinbase Head of AI Product Lincoln Murr said: “Moving the protocol to the Linux Foundation, with dozens of members spanning every corner of internet payments and infrastructure, is how open technology earns lasting trust across an industry. We look forward to building out x402 further with the community.”