Coinbase has announced a new partnership with Cloudflare to create the x402 Foundation, a body tasked with turning the x402 protocol into a universal standard for AI-driven payments. The initiative aims to address the shortcomings of traditional payment systems, which were built for human use but not for machine-to-machine transactions.
By embedding payments directly into web interactions, the protocol allows AI agents, apps, and APIs to exchange value as easily as they exchange data.
— Coinbase Developer Platform
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Legacy payment systems weren’t built for machines, but x402 changes that by embedding payments directly into web interactions,… pic.twitter.com/Uma0jH2xmn(@CoinbaseDev) September 23, 2025
According to Coinbase, the x402 model takes its name from the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code. It introduces a seamless way to manage transactions across digital platforms, paving the way for agentic commerce where AI systems and humans interact financially without friction.
The x402 protocol has already proven real use cases from wide-ranging sectors. It also offers pay-per-use access to high-end research and AI models and allows resources to become easier to access with no commitment to subscriptions.
It’s also being used by developers for real-time data, scrape services, and analytics needs as a pay-as-you-go method.
Among other use cases are micropayments aimed at creators, identity verification, storage, and media-on-demand. Others that are being tested are AI-to-AI payments, where systems automatically process payments while carrying out tasks.
Market watchers such as Ryan Selkis mention that the model has the potential to revolutionize the digital economy if it scales. By removing intermediaries and facilitating payments directly, companies may bring about new monetization tools from API access through to streaming of media, all driven with stablecoin-based microtransactions.
The launch of the x402 Foundation suggests a long-term vision. Coinbase and Cloudflare target running the protocol as an open and neutral standard and invite developer contributions as well as from global business houses and AI companies.
Cloudflare is offering deferred payment functionalities for the beta of their pay-per-crawl and is integrating x402 as part of the real-world infrastructures of the internet.
Areas of focus of the Foundation are governance, ecosystem growth through grants and tools, and interoperability of sectors. As adoption grows further, the tech has the capacity to enable empowered systems that are autonomous, from driverless taxis that conduct their own transactions to logistics systems operating with no manual intervention.
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