Coinbase and Cloudflare are taking aim at the future of online payments with a new initiative they say could underpin the rise of autonomous AI-driven transactions.
The companies are co-founding the x402 Foundation, designed to promote x402 as an open, neutral standard for AI-enabled payments. The effort uses the internet’s little-known HTTP “402 Payment Required” code to embed value transfer directly into web interactions.
Coinbase says the protocol is designed to give AI agents the ability to buy and sell services without human involvement. By eliminating intermediaries, the protocol is intended to make commerce between machines as seamless as exchanging data.
“Legacy payment systems were built for people, not machines. They rely on intermediaries, subscriptions, and manual processes that make scaling agentic commerce nearly impossible. x402 changes this by enabling real-time, stablecoin-based transactions that are fast, secure, and frictionless.”
The crypto exchange notes that the ecosystem is rapidly expanding, and x402 is already powering use cases such as pay-per-use AI and research, on-demand data and signals, creator micropayments, storage and media, and agentic commerce.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare will integrate the protocol into its services, including adding deferred payments to its “pay per crawl” beta.
Says Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong,
“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.”
Earlier this month, Coinbase teamed up with Google in an experiment to show that an AI agent can diagnose a do-it-yourself project, source products, and complete checkout, all in one prompt, without a card swipe. During the experiment, Coinbase leveraged the x402 protocol.
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