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Coinbase, Cloudflare and Stripe are competing to build payment rails for AI agents against at least two competing standards for machine-to-machine commerce, with a rival effort called the Machine Payments Protocol launched by Stripe and the crypto venture firm Paradigm.
Big names in crypto, payments and cloud infrastructure are racing to build the financial plumbing for a world in which AI agents — not humans — handle transactions on the internet. Coinbase Global Inc., Cloudflare Inc. and Stripe are forming a nonprofit foundation to govern x402, an open-source protocol that lets software make instant payments without human involvement — one of at least two competing standards vying to become the default rails for machine-to-machine commerce. An additional 20 companies are joining the foundation as members, including Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon Web Services, American Express Co., and crypto companies like Circle Internet Group Inc., and Solana Foundation. The foundation will be housed under the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has been long supporting the development of open source software, most notably the Linux kernel.
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