AI agentic payments enter mainstream as Visa, Mastercard, Ripple back x402 standard

Agentic commerce (Xavi Torrent/Getty Images)

The Linux Foundation formally launched the x402 Foundation, backed by major card networks and tech firms, to standardize internet-native payments between software agents.
The x402 protocol activates the long-reserved HTTP 402 “Payment Required” code to let clients pay servers directly with small stablecoin transfers, typically USDC, without accounts or prior relationships.
X402 processed about 75 million transactions totaling $24 million over the past 30 days, mostly sub-dollar payments that enable machine-to-machine commerce but still represent a tiny volume compared with traditional payment networks.

Every major card network has signed on to a payment standard built so that software can pay software without human involvement, bringing closer an era of high-volume, low-value payments between AI agents.

The Linux Foundation said Tuesday that the x402 Foundation is now operating under formal governance with 40 members, and that Coinbase's contribution to the protocol is complete.

Premier members include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana and Stellar foundations.

The protocol closes a 30-year-old loose end. When the World Wide Web’s architects wrote the rules for how browsers and servers talk to each other, they set aside a response code numbered ‘402’ and labeled it "Payment Required," expecting someone would eventually build payments into the web itself.

Card fees made charging a fraction of a cent pointless, so the web eventually monetized through ads, subscriptions and API keys instead, and 402 sat unused.

Coinbase, among others, filled that gap in May 2025. Under x402, a server that wants payment responds with a 402 return code and a price. The client signs a stablecoin transfer (usually USDC), resends the request with the payment attached, and receives the data. The exchange takes seconds and needs no account, no card and no prior relationship.

How AI benefits

That is why the AI industry cares. An autonomous agent cannot open a bank account, pass a credit check or sign a SaaS contract, but can sign a transaction. Google has wired x402 into its own agent payments protocol, and Cloudflare ships it in its agent toolkit.

The Linux announcement included no usage figures, though x402 publishes them on its own homepage. The protocol handled about 75 million transactions over the past 30 days, or roughly 29 every second, moving about $24 million between some 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers.

That works out to an average payment of about 32 cents, meaning the machine-to-machine thesis works as designed. No card network can process such small charges profitably.

Still, $24 million a month is a fraction of what any of x402's premier members move in a day. Visa alone handled $14.2 trillion of payments in fiscal 2025, an average of $40 billion a day.

Onchain data provider DefiLlama tracks a metric it labels DEX volume for x402, which reached nearly $970,000 in a single day on Dec. 3. Volume has fallen steadily since, coming in at just about $16,000 on July 13 and roughly $572,000 across the past 30 days.

These are, however, early days. SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son predicted that by 2040, some 100 trillion AI agents will have been created, NHK reported on Tuesday. If each makes just one 32-cent transaction a day, that’s a daily volume of $32 trillion.

UPDATE (July 15, 09:39 UTC): Rewrites headline, adds Visa transaction volume in third-last paragraph, AI agent forecast in final paragraph.

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