Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News
On April 2, the "402 Payment Required" status code, which had been shelved for 30 years, officially had its own foundation.
The Linux Foundation, a leading organization in the open-source field, announced the launch of the x402 Foundation and accepted Coinbase's transfer of contributions to the x402 protocol.
The choice of April 2nd for the official announcement is itself a point of interest. Even more noteworthy is the simultaneous release of the founding member list. Coinbase, Cloudflare, and Stripe jointly issued a statement of support, and over twenty organizations, including Amazon Web Services, American Express, Google, Mastercard, Visa, Circle, Shopify, Microsoft, the Solana Foundation, and Polygon Labs, joined the initial membership.
This list is truly "star-studded," with just a few of the companies represented being top players in the fields of finance, technology, and Web3 infrastructure.
Ironically, most x402 ecosystem-related tokens have plummeted 80%-98% from their peak. On one hand, there's a seemingly promising technological concept that's been collectively bet on by industry giants; on the other hand, there are token prices that are nearly collapsing. This contradictory story is worth telling.
The internet has a 30-year-old hole.
Let me clarify one thing first: 402 is not a new invention; it revives an old regulation that had been shelved for nearly 30 years.
In the 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee and his team included a status code in the definition of the HTTP protocol: 402 Payment Required. The meaning is straightforward—the server can tell the client "pay first, then provide the resources." However, at that time, there was no suitable payment infrastructure, and 402 became one of the most famous "placeholders" in internet history.
Until Coinbase decided to activate it. Coinbase officially launched the x402 protocol in May 2025. Its logic is extremely simple: when a client (which can be a human or an AI agent) requests a resource, the server returns a 402 status code with payment specifications; the client evaluates the price, initiates a USDC on-chain micropayment, and then resubmits the request—the whole process is completed within seconds.
The elegance of this design lies in the fact that it requires no account registration, no API key, and no prior establishment of billing relationships. The AI Agent reads the 402 response, pays, takes the resources, and continues working—all without human intervention.
Why did this suddenly become so urgent in 2025? Because the emergence of AI agents has completely exposed the structural contradictions in the payment system. McKinsey predicted in October 2025 that by 2030, agent commerce, where AI agents autonomously represent merchants and consumers to complete transactions, will coordinate and process $3 trillion to $5 trillion in economic value.
The money is there, but there's no track. X402 is that track.
Why is joining the Linux Foundation important?
The governance has changed, and that's the most important thing.
For an open-source project to become an industry benchmark, you need to demonstrate that its governance is independent of any single vendor. Take Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform, for example. Originally developed by Google, its adoption skyrocketed after being donated to the CNCF (a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation), eventually becoming the industry standard for container orchestration. This path has been proven numerous times.
Specifically regarding x402, the handover means three things. First, control of the protocol returns to the community; Coinbase cannot unilaterally modify the protocol rules or inject commercial interests into the standard. In the words of Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin: "The x402 Foundation will be an open, community-governed home, ensuring the protocol evolves in a transparent, interoperable, and widely participatory manner."
Second, lower the compliance threshold for large institutions. Companies like Mastercard and American Express have strict legal requirements and are unlikely to approve infrastructure that "relies on agreements with a single commercial company." Once the agreement belongs to a neutral nonprofit foundation, this threshold disappears.
Third, transferring the protocol to the Linux Foundation sends a signal: this is a technological direction the entire industry is betting on. Coinbase voluntarily relinquished ownership of the protocol in exchange for the entire industry's willingness to collaborate in building it.
The premise that this deal is worthwhile is that Coinbase believes that once x402 becomes a true internet standard, the benefits it will gain as the largest ecosystem participant will far outweigh the cost of monopolizing the protocol.
What does this list of founding members signify?
Looking back at the announcement on April 2, the list of founding members is well worth reading.
The 22 founding members, spanning four dimensions, have essentially provided the answer to the question, "Who is needed for AI Agent payments?"
The payment and financial network is the most crucial layer: Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, Adyen, Fiserv, Circle, PPRO, KakaoPay, and Ant International (Ant International appeared in Coinbase's official announcement but was not mentioned in the official image or Linux article). These institutions collectively handle the vast majority of consumer and merchant payment traffic globally.
Stripe is both a co-founder of the x402 Foundation and a proponent of the Machine Payments Protocol, betting on both fronts. Visa's statement is significant; Rubail Birwadker, its Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partner, stated that Visa's goal is to ensure secure and seamless payments regardless of where the AI Agent transacts or whether it uses credit cards or stablecoins.
On the cloud and infrastructure side are AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare. AWS's AgentCore managed infrastructure, used for building, deploying, and operating production-grade AI agents, already has an x402 reference implementation. Google Cloud's AP2 protocol incorporates x402 into the on-chain settlement layer. The head of AWS AgentCore stated that, as autonomous participants in the digital economy, AI agents' ability to execute secure, frictionless payments is no longer an option but a fundamental capability.
On this side of Web3 are Coinbase, Base, Solana Foundation, Polygon Labs, Circle, and thirdweb.
The commercial application layer includes Shopify, Sierra, Merit Systems (which developed x402scan, MPPscan, and AgentCash), and Ampersend.ai, which can connect x402 to e-commerce, content, and data monetization scenarios.
This section will focus on Merit Systems and Ampersend.ai.
Merit Systems is a startup focused on Open Agentic Commerce, with products covering multiple layers of the agent commerce stack: Discovery, developer tools, and mass-market applications, such as the x402 ecosystem browser x402scan, the MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) ecosystem browser MPPscan, the CLI and agent skills AgentCash that enable AI agents to instantly access advanced paid data and services, and the AI-driven business automation tool Poncho.
Ampersend.ai is an agent economic control layer that officially launched on April 2nd. It supports each agent in creating an independent wallet and budget, enabling complete control.
This diverse membership conveys several clear industry consensuses: First, AI-driven autonomous payment is an irreversible technological trend, and no giant is willing to be absent from this payment war that concerns the future; second, open-source and neutral protocol standards are the foundation for cross-domain ecosystem collaboration, and closed solutions dominated by a single enterprise are difficult to adapt to the needs of the entire industry; third, the future payment system will inevitably be a fusion of traditional finance and blockchain technology, and the two are not opposed but complementary and symbiotic.
With such a promising concept, why have related tokens fallen by over 90%?
Now we've reached the most delicate part.
First, let's clarify one thing: the x402 protocol has no official token. The protocol's settlement currency is USDC. AI Agents pay in USDC, and developers receive payments in USDC as well. The entire protocol's design philosophy is to make payments as transparent as HTTP requests—it doesn't need an "x402 token" to capture value.
Well-known x402 ecosystem tokens include PING (the first token minted through the x402 protocol), Daydreams (focused on building autonomous agents and applications on the x402 payment track), and PAYAI (a payment verification infrastructure project). The prices of these tokens have fallen by 80%-98% from their previous highs.
On-chain data provides a more direct reflection of the ecosystem's cooling. The number of daily transactions on x402 has shrunk from a peak of approximately 3.8 million in November 2025 to tens of thousands today; daily transaction volume has fallen from over $2 million to just over $10,000 or $20,000 recently.
Source: x402scan
This contrast between "hot concepts but cold implementation" stems from a misalignment of several core logics within the crypto market:
1. The decoupling of "protocol standards" and "token capture" : The success of a protocol does not mean that a certain ecosystem token can capture all value. When on-chain data shows no substantial application growth, the market capitalization supported only by narrative will naturally collapse. More importantly, the x402 protocol itself has obvious architectural limitations and application shortcomings. It lacks built-in fraud detection, tax calculation, and refund logic. For the large-scale application of enterprise-level AI agents, these deficiencies are enough to be fatal weaknesses, making it difficult to support the long-term value expectations of the token.
2. The asymmetry between institutional entry and retail investor expectations: When AWS and Coinbase announced their entry, formal protocol development and commercialization might have taken years. The crypto market is accustomed to prematurely pricing in narratives of "a huge future." When the speed of actual adoption cannot keep up with the expansion speed of the narrative, corrections occur.
3. Early data falsification : Although the x402 ecosystem experienced explosive growth, an analysis by Artemis at the end of 2025 indicated that approximately 48% of the x402 protocol's transactions and 81% of its trading volume were flagged as non-organic. The data clearly shows that the protocol's "boom" was never supported by genuine demand from the beginning. However, the situation is currently improving.
4. The sharp drop in the x402 concept token was also affected to some extent by the overall market environment.
However, there is no doubt that real agency business activities are far from arriving.
An honest conclusion
The launch of the x402 Foundation is a crucial step for this protocol to become a truly open standard. The fact that Visa, Mastercard, and Google are all listed as initiators is not just a casual remark; it signifies that the x402 proposal has been recognized by traditional financial infrastructure as a direction "worth participating in shaping."
The fate of the x402 protocol ultimately depends on one simple thing: whether there are enough AI agents that are truly needed and capable of autonomously completing micropayments without human intervention.
The concept is real, and the future is real. But for investors, it's crucial to distinguish between "the victory of technology" and "token speculation." 98% of the decline was due to the bursting of a bubble, but on the ruins, the underlying architecture of this AI economy is only just beginning to sprout.
