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Adyen joins the x402 Foundation to help shape payments over HTTP
Adyen is joining the x402 Foundation, a Linux Foundation initiative, to help establish an open standard for payments over HTTP.
This week, Adyen joined the x402 Foundation as a founding member. The x402 Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation, serves as the neutral home for x402 - a standard for embedding payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data.
As the industry moves toward agent-driven interactions, there is a unique opportunity to define how transactions happen at the protocol level. At Adyen, we believe the success of this next phase depends on getting the foundations right. Joining the x402 Foundation allows us to actively contribute to that process, ensuring that the standards being developed today are technically sound, practical, scalable, and built to serve the real-world needs of global enterprises.
Keeping merchants at the center
As we shared when joining the Agentic AI Foundation, and in our perspective on building a merchant-first foundation for agentic commerce, the shift toward agent-driven interactions will only succeed if it delivers real value for merchants.
Open standards are critical, but without a clear focus on merchant outcomes, they risk introducing complexity or shifting control away from the businesses they are meant to serve. Our role in the x402 Foundation is to advocate for merchants directly: ensuring that what gets built is interoperable, globally applicable, and designed around the realities of running a large enterprise business rather than the preferences of any single platform or payment provider.
This means pushing for a standard that supports all payment methods while preserving the merchant-customer relationship. By ensuring global enterprises can participate without rebuilding their infrastructure, we remain grounded in trust, transparency, and reliability.
Why payments over HTTP - and why now?
Other protocols that we support - including ACP and UCP - have primarily focused on consumer-direct transactions: a shopper purchasing goods or services via an AI interface. x402 addresses a different layer: machine-to-machine transactions where agents pay autonomously for the tools, data, and services they consume as they operate - things like API access, paywalled content, or compute resources. These use cases require infrastructure embedded directly into machine-to-machine interactions rather than layered on top of existing checkout flows.
Many of these use cases are still emerging. But the standards being defined today will determine what is possible later. Joining the x402 Foundation lets us be part of that process - ensuring that whatever does emerge is built on an open, interoperable foundation that works for global enterprise merchants, not just the players who moved first.
How we are positioned to contribute
The internet was built on open protocols and open standards. Payments have historically sat outside that architecture - fragmented, bespoke, and dependent on integrations that were never designed for a world where software transacts autonomously at scale.
At Adyen, we help businesses navigate this complexity without rebuilding their infrastructure every time the landscape shifts. We operate across 40+ markets on a single platform, work with the world’s largest enterprise merchants, and are already integrated with the leading agentic commerce protocols. Our approach - integrate once, access a broad and evolving ecosystem of agents, protocols, and payment methods - is directly relevant to what x402 is trying to achieve.
Joining the x402 Foundation lets us bring that perspective to the development of the standard itself. It gives us a seat at the table to help shape payments over HTTP — ensuring it is open, interoperable, and synced with the realities of global commerce.
We’re excited to help you with what’s next.
Tom Adams