Visa, Mastercard and Ripple back x402 as agent payments average 32 cents

Every major card network has signed on to a payment standard built so that software can pay software without a human involved.

The Linux Foundation said Tuesday that the x402 Foundation is now operating under formal governance with 40 members, and that Coinbase's contribution of 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 fills in a thirty-year-old loose end. When the 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.