Coinbase and Cloudflare Will Launch the x402 Foundation: Building the Future of Agentic Commerce
By Dan Kim and Erik Reppel
Today, Coinbase is announcing our intent to launch the x402 Foundation, in collaboration with Cloudflare. This new initiative is designed to establish x402 as the universal standard for AI-driven payments. By creating a neutral, open standard, we aim to unlock the full potential of agentic commerce, enabling seamless, autonomous transactions between AI agents, businesses, and users.
Why the x402 Foundation Matters
The x402 protocol is revolutionizing how payments work on the internet. By leveraging the HTTP "402 Payment Required" status code, x402 embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data. This innovation eliminates the friction of traditional payment systems, paving the way for a new era of automated, scalable commerce.
The ecosystem is rapidly expanding as developers and companies recognize its potential. And while adoption is still in its early stages, x402 is already powering transformative use cases, including:
As momentum accelerates, x402 is poised to become the backbone of agent-driven economies, transforming how value is exchanged across the internet. However, for x402 to reach its full potential, it must be an open, neutral standard. The x402 Foundation ensures transparent governance, fostering collaboration, and inviting contributions from across the ecosystem.
A New Era for Payments
Legacy payment systems were built for people, not machines. They rely on intermediaries, subscriptions, and manual processes that make scaling agentic commerce nearly impossible. x402 changes this by enabling real-time, stablecoin-based transactions that are fast, secure, and frictionless.
The x402 Foundation will focus on:
Unlocking New Possibilities
With the x402 Foundation, we’re laying the groundwork for a future where AI agents can autonomously transact, creating entirely new workflows and business models.
A Collaborative Future
The x402 Foundation will be co-founded by Coinbase and Cloudflare, with additional members to be announced. Partnering with Cloudflare allows us to leverage their expertise in internet infrastructure and global scalability to ensure x402 becomes a truly universal standard. For example, Cloudflare will be adding a deferred payments scheme to x402 to their pay per crawl beta, enabling developers to integrate payments seamlessly into web-based data access and services.
Cloudflare’s commitment to an open and accessible internet aligns perfectly with the goals of the x402 Foundation, enabling us to build a payments protocol that works seamlessly across platforms, geographies, and industries.
Together, we’re committed to building an open, programmable economy that benefits everyone—from developers and businesses to the users and agents they serve.
And this is just the beginning. We’ll be looking to add more members as this scales, including those who are using x402 in production; representatives across consumer, enterprise, and developer-focused companies; AI companies building LLMs; e-commerce platforms, and much more.
You can learn more about the x402 Foundation and how you can get involved at https://www.x402.org/.
Helping tech innovators build AI & Web3 solutions | CPO / CTO
7hPayments built for AI and APIs? Finally! x402 could change how we pay. Fast, simple, and programmatic. The real challenge? Getting people to trust invisible AI agents handling their money.
Ex-Intern @Nethermind || TRDDC || ISRO || Bitquery
1dStandardization efforts will lead to a network effect (the more people use it, the better it gets)
Inspiring growth through content creation and strategic coaching.
2dDan Kim, I've got a client Ray Bast, CBDA who would be a great fit at coinbase, do you have a few minutes that I could talk to you?
Founder, AIONET Protocol | Building the AI-Governed Layer 1 (PoM + HBM-DRAM) | Seeking Seed Funding | 24+ yrs FDA/ISO/SEMICON
3d💡 This is a big step forward — making payments native to AI agents, APIs, and the modern web is overdue. That said, standards like x402 will still rely on the performance and trust layer beneath them. If the foundation is slow or fragile, agents can’t truly transact in real time. That’s where next-gen architectures like Proof of Memory + Proof of Drift (AIONET) come in. Instead of retrofitting payments onto legacy consensus, they anchor trust directly in hardware entropy — delivering sub-second finality and AI-scored validation that can keep pace with autonomous agents. Excited to see x402 unlock programmability. The next question: can the underlying consensus keep up with the agents it’s meant to serve? ⚡