Tech and crypto giants form x402 Foundation to build payment rails for AI agents

A coalition of more than 15 technology and finance heavyweights including Google, Microsoft, Visa and Coinbase have formed a new foundation to standardize how artificial intelligence agents transact on the internet, a move aimed at creating a unified payment layer for the burgeoning AI economy.

"There will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a statement. The new x402 Foundation, launched Thursday with the Linux Foundation, will provide a “neutral, nonprofit home” for the Coinbase-initiated x402 protocol to foster wider adoption, the company said.

The foundation’s membership signals broad consensus on the need for a dedicated AI payment standard, uniting rivals like Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services with payment incumbents Visa and Mastercard. The crypto industry is also heavily represented, with Circle, Solana Foundation, Polygon Labs and Coinbase’s own layer-2 network, Base, joining as founding members.

The initiative aims to build the financial plumbing for a future where autonomous AI agents seamlessly pay for API access, data, and other digital services across both traditional fiat and crypto rails. The move comes as executives like Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire predict that “literally billions of AI agents” will be transacting on-chain within five years, a sentiment echoed by former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who has called crypto the “native currency for AI.”

Transaction Volume Shows Early Spike

The x402 protocol is an open standard designed to solve the problem of programmatic payments, allowing applications and AI agents to autonomously query and pay for services. While the foundation’s launch marks a major step toward formalizing the protocol, on-chain data shows its use has been volatile.

According to data from Dune Analytics, weekly transactions using the protocol saw a massive spike in November 2025, peaking at 13.7 million in the first full week of the month. Activity has since cooled considerably, with weekly transactions falling to between 29,000 and 1.1 million throughout early 2026. This pattern suggests a period of intense early experimentation that has since normalized as developers refine use cases.

The launch comes amid an unprecedented capital flood into the AI sector, highlighted by OpenAI’s recent record-breaking $122 billion funding round. That investment is fueling the development of ever-more sophisticated AI agents that will require robust infrastructure for payments and value exchange, the very problem the x402 Foundation aims to solve. By placing the protocol under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation—a bastion of major open-source projects—the members aim to prevent the protocol from being controlled by a single corporate entity, encouraging universal adoption.

For investors, the formation of the x402 Foundation is a significant, long-term validation for blockchain infrastructure as a core component of the future AI economy. The inclusion of multiple layer-1 and layer-2 networks like Solana, Polygon, and Base suggests a multi-chain future for AI-driven transactions. While the protocol’s transaction volume is modest today, the backing of nearly every major player in tech and payments signals that the foundational work is underway for a substantial increase in on-chain activity driven by non-human agents. This could drive long-term investment into projects focused on decentralized infrastructure, AI, and high-throughput blockchains capable of handling machine-speed payments.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.