The stewards

A few large organisations decide what x402 costs, who governs it and where it runs. This lesson takes them one at a time and lists only what each has actually shipped, with the date it happened.

Suppose Coinbase raised its facilitator fee from $0.001 to $0.002 a settlement. A seller charging $0.002 a call would then hand Coinbase its entire price on every settlement above the free allowance. A few large organisations can move numbers like that, or decide which chains and countries x402 works in. They are worth knowing first.

This lesson lists what each one has shipped, with dates. Plans and announcements are marked as plans.

Coinbase and CDP

Coinbase created x402. Erik Reppel, who leads engineering at the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP), is named as its creator and is Coinbase’s representative on the steering committee. Coinbase runs the largest facilitator, the Bazaar catalogue and its own developer kit, the CDP SDK.

Coinbase and CDP

Coinbase and CDP

Coinbase and CDP

The facilitator’s price is the one every rival is measured against: nothing for the first 1,000 settlements each month and $0.001 for each one after that (14 Oct) source. Checking a payment is free (14 Oct) source.

The x402 Foundation

On 2 April 2026 the Linux Foundation announced the x402 Foundation and Coinbase’s contribution of the protocol, with 22 organisations expressing support, AWS, Google, Shopify and Visa among them. The Foundation became fully operational on 14 July 2026 with 40 members. On 1 October 2026 it named Michael Hursta, a payments executive who previously worked at Amazon, PwC and First Data, as executive director.

The x402 Foundation

Membership comes in tiers. Premier members pay $200,000 (14 Oct) source a year and get a seat on the governing board. General members pay $25,000 to $75,000 (14 Oct) source depending on headcount, and academic and nonprofit bodies join free. The members page lists 57 (14 Oct) source organisations (58 on 11 October 2026). 19 (14 Oct) source of them are Premier, including Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Circle, Google, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.

The x402 Foundation

Technical decisions belong to a steering committee with three seats: Erik Reppel for Coinbase, Rohin Lohe for Cloudflare and Steve Kaliski for Stripe (14 Oct) source. It decides by majority. Changing the core principles or removing a member needs 75% of the vote, as do certain licence changes.

That is neutral on paper. In practice Coinbase holds the most senior committee seat, and the researchers found its engineers among the protocol’s top contributors. So far the Foundation has published no board members, no chair and no official X account (14 Oct) source.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare

Cloudflare

The Monetization Gateway is the seller side. A site owner sets which requests cost money, the price and the wallet to pay. An agent gets a 402, signs a payment and retries. The Gateway checks it, settles it in USDC on Base through Coinbase’s facilitator (14 Oct) source, and returns the content. The minimum price is $0.001 (14 Oct) source a request. Cloudflare has published no fee of its own (14 Oct) source, and no volume figures. Its named launch users are Cloudflare’s own AI Gateway, Ceramic.ai, Stocktwits and API2PDF.

Cloudflare

Stripe

Stripe helped develop x402 and holds one of the three committee seats. Its own docs say machine payments on Stripe work best with MPP (14 Oct) source: the Machine Payments Protocol, which Stripe co-authored with Tempo and launched in mid-March 2026. Stripe accepts x402 for USDC on Base only (14 Oct) source, through a preview version of its API, and those payments settle through Coinbase’s facilitator. MPP runs on Tempo and Solana (14 Oct) source. Stripe’s minimums are $0.50 (14 Oct) source for card payments and 0.01 USDC (14 Oct) source for stablecoin payments. Lesson 5 looks at what that steering means for sellers.

AWS

AWS launched Bedrock AgentCore Payments in preview in May 2026 with x402 support and made it generally available on 18 August 2026. At that point it added MPP and x402’s upto scheme, which lets an agent set a spending ceiling and pay for what it uses. Agents pay from Coinbase or Stripe (Privy) wallets, funded by card or USDC (14 Oct) source. AWS has published no usage figures. It is the clearest case of x402 inside a mainstream enterprise product.

Circle

Circle issues USDC, the dollar stablecoin that most x402 payments use. Its Nanopayments service has been live on mainnet since 29 April 2026 and now runs on 12 chains (14 Oct) source. It moves USDC without gas fees, down to $0.000001 (14 Oct) source, by settling many payments together. That matters for anyone pricing calls below a tenth of a cent, where a $0.001 fee on each payment would cost more than the payment. Circle also opened its own chain, Arc, on 16 September 2026 with more than 100 builders at launch. No x402 volume on Arc had been reported by 11 October.

Members who haven’t shipped x402

Membership and partnership aren’t products. Visa and Mastercard are Premier members with no first-party x402 product. Mastercard launched its own Agent Pay for Machines on 10 June 2026 with more than 30 partners, including Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe and Tempo. OpenAI appears only in a cookbook example, written with AWS, that pays an x402 merchant on the Base Sepolia test network.

When you read that a big company “supports x402”, check which of these it means: a seat, a membership, a press quote, a beta or a product people can use today. The players directory lists each steward with what it has shipped.

What to watch

Changes from these organisations move the whole market. Four are worth checking for:

• a change to Coinbase’s facilitator price or free allowance;
• a change to Stripe’s network table, such as x402 on Solana or MPP on Base;
• a published Cloudflare fee, new countries for the Gateway, or any volume figures;
• names for the Foundation’s board, chair and treasurer.