Coinbase and Cloudflare have created the x402 Foundation, an industry group that will build an open standard for machine-to-machine payments.
The effort, unveiled Sept. 23, aims to give AI systems and digital agents a seamless way to transact value directly across the Internet.
Cloudflare, which powers nearly a fifth of all websites, said the new framework will embed payments into web interactions in the same way error codes, such as “404 Not Found,” define browsing behavior.
According to the firm:
“Every day, sites on Cloudflare send out over a billion HTTP 402 response codes to bots and crawlers trying to access their content and e-commerce stores. This response code comes with a simple message: ‘Payment Required.’”
With x402, the “Payment Required” response would allow AI agents, APIs, or applications to pay for services, whether research data, storage, or media, at the exact moment they request it.
Coinbase added that the foundation was formed to address the limits of legacy infrastructure, which still depends on intermediaries, subscriptions, and manual steps. By enabling real-time, stablecoin-based settlement, x402 is designed to support agent-driven commerce at internet scale.
Speaking on the initiative, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said:
“I’ve been thinking about how internet payments should work for years. Or more specifically, how they aren’t working, and need to improve. x402 is a big step forward. AI agents can now transact value, not just exchange info.”
Why x402 Foundation?
The x402 Foundation will focus on governance and interoperability to encourage adoption across industries.
Coinbase said developers will receive grants, tools, and resources to experiment with applications such as pay-per-use AI models, creator micropayments, or on-demand identity services.
For the standard to take hold, Coinbase emphasized it must remain neutral and open. That principle, it argued, will make x402 portable across platforms, jurisdictions, and economic sectors, preventing fragmentation as machine commerce expands.
Cloudflare is also piloting a deferred-payments option within its pay-per-crawl beta.
The feature would let websites charge AI agents that scrape their pages, turning automated data access into a revenue source without relying on ad models or subscription fees.
It added:
“This new scheme is specifically designed for agentic payments that don’t need immediate settlement and can be handled either through traditional payment methods or stablecoins. By proposing this addition, we’re helping to ensure that any compliant server can optionally decouple the cryptographic handshake from the payment settlement itself, giving agents and servers the ability to use pre-negotiated licensing agreements, batch settlements, or subscriptions.”
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