OAKLAND, Calif. — Block has joined the x402 Foundation, saying it will help develop an open payment standard that allows artificial intelligence agents to make purchases and pay for services online.
Steve Reis, head of product for Block Financial Platform, said in a Sept. 24 company blog post that Block will participate in the foundation’s working groups, continue contributing support for payments over the Bitcoin Lightning Network and build tools for commerce conducted by AI agents.
The x402 protocol lets websites and applications request payment as part of a standard web interaction. Coinbase created the protocol and contributed it to the Linux Foundation, which announced the x402 Foundation’s operational launch in July. The foundation said 40 organizations had joined at launch to help govern and develop the standard.
‘Open Rails Standards’
“We believe the agentic economy should be built on open rails: standards that any developer can implement, that no single company controls and that create room for new use cases while lowering costs for everyone who participates,” Reis wrote.
Block said the standard could help sellers reach customers using AI agents and allow those agents to pay both for purchases and for services needed to complete a task. Reis also said Lightning could support the large number of small payments he expects AI agents to generate. Those uses describe Block’s plans for the technology, rather than services announced as available to customers.
Erik Reppel, who created x402 and serves on the foundation’s technical steering committee, said Block’s work on Lightning would expand the payment options available to developers.
Block’s membership follows its work on goose, an open-source AI agent, and its involvement in the Agentic AI Foundation and Universal Commerce Protocol.
