Coinbase and CloudFlare announced the creation of the X402 Foundation on Tuesday, calling it a new governance agency designed to advance direct payment integration into the Internet’s core protocols.
This initiative is built on an HTTP “402 Payment” status code that has not been used historically to enable the x402 protocol. This is an approach that incorporates payments into web interactions. The move aims to reduce friction in digital transactions and lay the foundation for agent-driven commercial across AI systems, APIs and applications.
The X402 protocol is gaining momentum among developers and businesses experimenting with a pay-per-use model. Early pilots included per-riquet 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 can allow intermachine transactions (sometimes called “agent commerce”) to be expanded in ways that legacy payment rails struggle to support.
The X402 Foundation aims to ensure that the standard remains open and neutral. Its governance model is expected to promote ecosystem-wide contributions and will prevent fragmentation as adoption expands.
