> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data.
Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)
article says it's mostly for agents, users will not be directly involved
> At the same time, an agent can make thousands of micropayments without friction, while asking a person to approve each payment would be impossibly burdensome.
but yes, they will need wallets
but it's also optional, you do not want to buy these paid for requests, you do not need a wallet
> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data.
Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)
WHATWG, who sets the HTML standard:
> The central organizational membership and control of WHATWG – its "Steering Group" – consists of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft.
how will the end user pay? will we all have stablecoin wallets installed?
article says it's mostly for agents, users will not be directly involved
> At the same time, an agent can make thousands of micropayments without friction, while asking a person to approve each payment would be impossibly burdensome.
but yes, they will need wallets
but it's also optional, you do not want to buy these paid for requests, you do not need a wallet