Google and Visa join the online micro-payments revolution

Visa, Stripe and Google have joined the x402 Foundation as premier members, adding three of the biggest names in payments and search to an effort to build an open standard for machines that pay each other. The foundation, affiliated with the Linux Foundation, is developing x402, a protocol that lets AI agents transact with each other and with people directly over the web, without subscriptions or a human typing in card details. It takes its name from HTTP status code 402, "payment required" , a slot reserved in the rules of the web in the 1990s and left empty ever since. The reason it was left empty is the reason the current membership list is worth reading twice. Card fees made payments below roughly a dollar uneconomic, because the cost of processing swallowed the transaction. That single constraint pushed the entire internet towards advertising and subscriptions, the only two models that could clear the fee floor. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Adyen and Fiserv, the companies that set and collect those fees, are now premier members of the body building the alternative. Also on the list are Ripple, Shopify, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Circle, MoonPay and the Solana Foundation. Alin Dragos, a senior manager at AWS Payments, chairs the board. The foundation has formed a technical steering committee and opened a search for an executive director while expanding membership.

The pitch is that no single company should own the pipes. "You don't want to be in a walled garden when you're dealing with money," said Denelle Dixon, chief executive of the Stellar Development Foundation and a premier member. That framing is doing real work. Coinbase...