At the Visa Payments Forum 2026, Visa announced significant enhancements to its AI, stablecoin and token capabilities designed to power intelligent, programmable commerce. According to Business Wire, Jack Forestell, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Visa, outlined how AI is transforming the front end of commerce while stablecoins are reshaping the back end. The company unveiled Visa Intelligent Commerce, a platform for agentic commerce that provides trust, controls and connectivity needed for AI agents to securely discover, initiate and complete transactions. Key innovations include Agent Score, a new tool that allows merchants to evaluate their websites for agentic commerce readiness, specifically whether AI agents can navigate, understand and complete tasks on a merchant's website. Additionally, Agentic Directory provides a verified list of agents and merchants that Visa has verified as legitimate participants in agentic commerce, addressing the critical need for trust and confidence in AI-driven transactions.
The Linux-affiliated x402 Foundation has launched as a neutral space where competitors and payment methods can collaborate to create an open standard for AI agentic commerce. According to reports from The Block, the foundation now has 40 members including premier participants such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Ripple, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare. The foundation is led by Alin Dragos, senior manager at AWS Payments, who serves as board chairperson. As reported by The Block, the search for an x402 Foundation executive director is currently underway, and the group has established a technical steering committee. In the formal operational launch announcement, Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare chief strategy officer, credited the sheer number of companies willing to build the standard together as proof of how badly it was needed, stating "Standards thrive when the industry actually shows up to build them."
The x402 protocol is a payments standard for internet-based transacting, developed by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and now stewarded by its eponymous foundation. According to The Block, the protocol enables payments between AI agents, machines, and users through the standard internet language Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) without requiring subscriptions or manual entry of credit card details. The protocol takes its name from the '402 payment required' response code built by early World Wide Web architects to allow browsers to pay for content, though card payments and associated fees previously made micropayments unworkable. At its core, x402 lets one piece of software pay another for access to something — a live weather lookup, a stock quote, a slice of compute, a chunk of scraped data — the same kind of thing companies have always sold through APIs, just paid for per request rather than through an account. With x402, the agent instead pays at the moment it needs the API: it sends a normal HTTP request, receives a 'payment required' response, settles the payment using a connected stablecoin wallet, and gets the requested data back immediately — no account, no advance relationship with the provider, and no key to manage.
The x402 protocol has demonstrated significant early traction, processing more than 75 million transactions worth $24.24 million over the past 30 days alone. According to the foundation's own tracker, these transactions span 94,060 buyers (agents or applications making payments) and 22,000 sellers (services accepting them), though the figures don't break down by actual use case. Major technology companies have already begun implementing x402 solutions. In June 2025, AWS and Coinbase teamed up to allow any website running on AWS's cloud infrastructure to charge AI agents per request, with Coinbase's facilitator handling verification and settlement behind the scenes. A few weeks later, Cloudflare followed with a similar tool, letting customers charge for web pages, datasets, APIs, or AI tools using the same protocol. Mike Dolan, who leads projects and legal teams at the Linux Foundation, notes that "Organizations are far more likely to collaborate on shared infrastructure if they trust that it is governed neutrally," emphasizing the importance of neutral governance for the agentic economy.
Injective has joined the x402 Foundation as a core member, positioning itself at the intersection of payments, crypto infrastructure, and autonomous commerce. According to Injective, the blockchain has officially become a core member alongside Google, AWS, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and Circle, following its launch of an on-chain AI agent SDK that gives developers a toolkit to build autonomous AI applications directly on-chain. The protocol enables developers to create AI agents capable of owning digital assets, executing trades, tokenizing assets, and conducting native blockchain transactions from launch. As per Injective, these agents are designed to participate directly in decentralized financial activity rather than acting as simple automated bots. The combination of its AI Agent SDK and x402 foundation membership signals a broader push toward infrastructure built specifically for autonomous commerce. The timing is notable as interest in AI-focused blockchain infrastructure continues to accelerate, with Injective reporting that thousands of autonomous AI agents are already operating across its network using the INJ token and more than 2.9 billion transactions have been processed as agentic finance continues expanding on-chain.
The x402 protocol and broader AI agent economy are gaining significant momentum as infrastructure shifts from theory to deployment. A recent Coinpedia research report projects the AI agent crypto market could reach $200 billion by 2030, driven by enterprise AI adoption, autonomous software, and expanding on-chain financial infrastructure. The foundation's governance model is designed to prevent vendor lock-in by giving developers, cloud providers, financial institutions, and payment companies a voice in the protocol's future. It supports multiple payment methods, including payment cards, stablecoins, and blockchain-based assets. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, noted that artificial intelligence agents have become active participants in the global economy but still lack a native and secure way to transact online, adding that the foundation aims to establish an interoperable payment layer capable of supporting digital commerce across different industries. The premier membership tier includes Ripple alongside Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Circle, MoonPay, the Solana Foundation, and the Stellar Development Foundation, with general members including Injective, the NEAR Foundation, Polygon Labs, and World Liberty Financial.
