Lessons from the early days of building the web are being brought to bear in establishing an open standard for AI-driven commerce, according to members of the Linux-affiliated x402 Foundation, a payment protocol designed for AI agents.
Denelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation, one of the premier members of the x402 Foundation, helped engineer open-source browsers during the first iteration of the internet. She witnessed first hand when walled gardens were erected, and “five companies basically took over content on the web,” leading to the advertising-driven attention economy that exists today.
“You don't want to be in a walled garden when you're dealing with money,” Dixon said in an interview.
The x402 protocol is a payments standard for internet-based transacting, developed by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and now stewarded by its eponymous foundation. The goal is to enable payments between AI agents, machine and users through the standard internet language Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) without requiring subscriptions or manual entry of credit card details and the like.
The stakes are high because AI agents, which will likely account for a large portion of internet commerce, some of it in the form of tiny micropayments, could completely reshape the web. “It may seem nerdy to care about standards so much, but we have the opportunity to create this truly open public global financial system that everyone can have access to,” Dixon added.
Other premier members of the x402 Foundation include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, alongside Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation.
Coinbase initially shepherded the x402 payment protocol, which takes its name from the “402 payment required” response code built by early World Wide Web architects to allow browsers to pay for content.
However, card payments and the associated fees made micropayments unworkable, and business models on the internet evolved through advertising and subscriptions, leaving the 402 gateway unused.
Bringing x402 under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is exactly the right "open-source playground” required for a collaborative open standard to be built, according to Alin Dragos, senior manager at AWS Payments, who has taken the role of board chairperson to the x402 Foundation.
The plan, Dragos said, is to complement the original design of HTTP, the foundational set of rules that allows web browsers and servers to communicate.
“We solved the problem whereby participants on the internet can exchange information, but we don't actually have a good way to exchange value,” Dragos said in an interview. “In order to build a standard, you need many competitors and payment methods to come and work together and it’s important to have this neutral ground to pave the way for agents to transact on behalf of people.”
Dragos said the search for an x402 Foundation executive director is now underway, and the group has established a technical steering committee. “We also increased the number of members, which is a pretty good sign so for a foundation that's about three months old just became operational, we feel like we're in a pretty good spot,” he said.
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