Today is 4.02 day. Less than a year ago (May 6, 2025), we published the x402 whitepaper. Since then, the protocol has: • Processed 166M+ transactions • Unlocked new monetization models for API, data, and other providers on the web. • Enabled autonomous flows that were difficult to support with traditional account infrastructure Today, we’re taking the next step. x402 is moving to @linuxfoundation, and we are launching x402 Foundation - with broad, cross-industry collaboration & input to steward an open, neutral standard for payments over HTTP. A big thank you to our amazing founding partners in this effort: @Adyen, @Awscloud , @AmericanExpress, @Ampersend_ai, @Circle, @Cloudflare, @Coinbase, @Fiserv, @Google, @KakaoPayCorp, @Mastercard, @merit_systems, @Microsoft, @Polygon, @PPRO_Payments, @Shopify, @SierraPlatform, @Solana , @Stripe, @Thirdweb, and @Visa. Enrollment for the foundation is open if you - or your company - is interested in participating, please reach out!

1/ Coinbase built x402 so software can pay for a tool call the moment it makes one. Its developer platform team says the protocol gives Coinbase no special advantage and compares it to Anthropic releasing MCP. The edge Coinbase wants is in trading.

.@kleffew94, GTM Lead at @CoinbaseDev Platform, says x402 was built so agents could pay for tools with a wallet signature instead of signing up for hundreds of API keys. Stripe launched its Machine Payments SDK this week, which lets agents pay for APIs in stablecoins one request at a time.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines now runs on x402 and the Coinbase facilitator, so AI agents can pay for digital services. @kleffew94 on what x402 opens up, back in September: “Stablecoins are a great way, and also credit cards are a great way to enable access to these resources.” “Agents are actually rational economic actors that can ingest lots of information, lots of context, and execute micropayments at scale.” nitter.siddz.com/CoinbaseDev/status/211…

Aaron Levie of @Box on how AI agents with wallets could create new business models for the internet: "I've always wanted micropayments for things online... I've appreciated why it's a bad business model, but I want it." "Now it's probably a good business model. Let's say you had paywalled, really proprietary data. You're Bloomberg. You're a medical institution. You could imagine there's maybe a hundred million agents that would be tapping into that data." "All of a sudden, a penny a transaction starts to make a lot more sense than it did when you were capped at 20 million [knowledge workers] that maybe were interested in your content." "We probably have new business models for tools and APIs... We probably want an agent to be able to have a budget and make any API call it wants." "All of a sudden you have this new revenue stream, which is these agents showing up, just transacting on your system." @levie at Daytona Compute 2026

Now my agents can trade as I focus Thanks @kleffew94 for making it happen, so much fun partnering together ♥️

The internet’s business model was built around people: attention, ads, subscriptions and checkout. AI agents are changing that. They can retrieve and use content without sending a human reader back to the publisher. That raises a real question for creators, publishers and developers: how can they get paid when an agent uses their work, sometimes for a fraction of a cent? Our new Coinbase Institute @CoinbaseCBI paper, "Machine-to-machine payments in the AiFi era," examines why existing payment rails often struggle with high-velocity microtransactions—and why stablecoins on low-cost networks are a strong fit today. The policy goal should be an open, interoperable payment layer, with safeguards that match the risks—not closed marketplaces that decide who can participate.

Elon Musk explains why he thinks the phone, apps and operating systems are headed for extinction within 5-6 years, and how it plays out: "We're not going to have a phone in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference" "There won't be operating systems. There won't be apps in the future. It'll just be a device that is there for the screen and audio" "You'll get everything through AI. Whatever you can think of, or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it'll show you" "Most of what people consume in 5 or 6 years, maybe sooner than that, will be AI-generated content. Music, videos" "There are people who have made AI videos using Grok Imagine that are several minutes long, 10 or 15 minutes, and it's pretty coherent" "The phone will just display the pixels and make the sounds that it anticipates you would most like to receive" Interested in AI? Follow @AiEvolutio58513 and never fall behind. I track ChatGPT, Claude, and every tool quietly changing how we work and create, then hand you the tested signals.

The hard thing about agent identity/reputation in a nutshell

So few are interested in The Real Thing. Before Valar Atomics, there were many nuclear startups who had dreams of reactors, designs for reactors, licenses for reactors, and LOIs for reactors. None of those things interest us at Valar Atomics. Hardware is The Real Thing.

Our new AI dev tools are getting really good, so I put them to work and shipped a feature to production. Keyboard shortcuts are now live in Coinbase Advanced. It's a quality-of-life update for active traders, and hopefully helps out in our next trading competition as well. Press ? for the cheat sheet to get started in Coinbase Advanced (link in follow on post)

Agentic Finance (AiFi) spans trading, payments, permissions, and more. Excited to share the latest paper from Coinbase Institute, co-authored alongside @CKHctp, @MurrLincoln, and @smshr98, which explores the infrastructure that enables M2M payments.

Nice. @chamath is ‘headless merchant pilled’

The nature of the frontier is that it is ever shifting, evolving.

Math is progressing by hours now, not years

this would be a very funny way of instantly bringing us back to the dark ages

Using @massive_com's data through an AI agent, "you can get answers instantaneously that you need to make a trade decision." Each answer is paid for through x402, and "every request is only a cent." — Stevie Palmateer

In case you're wondering if @Coinbase is safe from the legit scary @drakefjustin post earlier. I seriously hope ECDSA isn't at risk, but at least Coinbase cold storage is already in "bunker mode."

The internet has a second customer. Software now retrieves, compares, and transacts on a person's behalf, and it does not watch ads. Publishers and developers need a way to charge for each use. New paper with @kleffew94 , @MurrLincoln and @smshr98.

Congrats to @shengkunye, @feiyou_guo and the monid team on this raise Monid is also available using x402 on Base btw!