The Linux Foundation has officially launched x402 Foundation to promote x402 as a common payment standard among software agents. The agreement was first launched by Coinbase and has now been handed over to 40 member institutions, including the Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Ripple, Google Cloud, AWS, Cloudflare, Circle and Solana and Stellar Foundation.

x402 Enable HTTP 402

The core approach of x402 is to use the long-held but rarely actually used HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. The server can give the price directly before returning the content, then the client completes the transfer in a stable currency and re-initiates the request with payment information to obtain data or services. The entire process usually does not require an account, a bank card or prior cooperation.

The past 30 days, 75 million.

Public data show that x402 processed approximately 75 million transactions over the past 30 days, totalling approximately $24 million, involving about 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers. On this basis, the average single payment was approximately $0.32.

  • In the past 30 days, the number of transactions was about 75 million.
  • In the past 30 days, the settlement was about $24 million.
  • Average single payment of approximately $ 0.32

This type of payment is dominated by small transactions and is closer to automatic settlement between machines rather than traditional consumption payments. Based on a 30-day caliber estimate, the agreement processed an average of about 29 transactions per second, indicating that its main purpose was to support the HF, low-value programmable transfer.

AI Agent is the main application scene

This is one of the reasons the AI industry is concerned about x402. Autonomous software agents are usually unable to open bank accounts, apply for credit cards or sign SaaS contracts as individuals or businesses do, but can sign directly and initiate a chain transfer.

It was reported that Google had access to its proxy payment agreement by 402 and that Cloudflare had been included in the proxy toolkit. For AI agents requiring frequent calls for data, interfaces and power resources, such primary payments can lower the threshold of access and support the sub-payment of more finer particles.

Still smaller than traditional payment networks

Although members have covered major card organizations and many technology companies, x 402 is still small. The settlement of $24 million over the past 30 days remains a significant gap in the scale of the day-to-day processing of traditional payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

In addition, an indicator related to x402 in the chain of data platform DefiLlama shows that its single-day data came close to $970,000 in December last year and then continued to fall back on 13 July, about $16,000, with an accumulation of about $572 million over the past 30 days. This indicates that the agreement has validated the small machine payment scenario, but that there is still a considerable distance from large-scale commercialization.