Block Joins the x402 Foundation to Advance Open, Agentic Commerce

Block has joined the x402 Foundation, an open standard for agentic payments, to help build the rails that will let people, businesses, and agents pay and get paid.

Agents are becoming a real part of how commerce happens. A shopper might send an agent to find and buy the right product; a business might run an agent to source supplies or pay for the services it depends on. For any of that to work, agents need a way to pay that is as simple and open as the web itself.

At Block, building in the open is how we work. We've contributed goose, our open-source AI agent, helped launch the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), and joined the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to enable agentic commerce for small businesses. Joining the x402 Foundation is a natural next step: it puts a neutral, community-governed payment standard underneath that work.

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.

x402 is an open standard that puts payment into HTTP, the protocol the web already runs on. It uses the long-dormant 402 Payment Required response so that a service can ask for a payment as part of the request. The standard is hosted under the Linux Foundation's neutral governance, is network and currency agnostic by design, and is built to be extended with new payment methods over time. That openness is what drew us in. When the rails are shared and neutral, more people can build on them, and value flows to the participants rather than to a gatekeeper.

Block sits across a rare span of commerce helping businesses get paid, helping people manage their money, and advancing Bitcoin as everyday money. An open, agent-native payment standard lets our customers transact seamlessly across all of it:

• Sellers can reach new buyers and their agents. As buyers begin to send agents to shop on their behalf, the businesses we serve can meet this new kind of customer through open, standard rails rather than one-off integrations.
• Agents can transact seamlessly. Open rails give agents a native way to pay on a customer's behalf and to pay for the agentic services they rely on through a standard rather than bespoke plumbing.
• Bitcoin as everyday money. Open agentic rails give Bitcoin a natural role in the everyday, high-volume, low-value payments the agentic economy will generate.

Block has contributed Bitcoin Lightning payments to the x402 protocol. Lightning is purpose-built for the instant, low-cost, high-volume payments that agentic commerce will depend on and bringing it to x402 adds the largest, most open monetary network to a standard designed to welcome exactly that kind of contribution. We're excited to help the industry move this forward, and to do our part in making Bitcoin everyday money.

"Agents will make billions of small payments, and those payments need rails that are instant, low-cost, and open to anyone. That's exactly what Lightning was built for. Bringing Lightning to x402 is a concrete step toward making Bitcoin everyday money for people and the agents acting on their behalf, and we're excited to help the industry build on it." — Steve Lee, Head of Spiral

The x402 Foundation brings together a broad community – card networks, payment processors, cloud providers, and stablecoin and blockchain organizations - all working on the same open standard. We're glad to be building alongside them.

Our contribution is to broaden the set of open, non-card options available on these rails. Investing in stablecoin and Bitcoin payments expands choice for developers and businesses, opens the door to use cases that weren't practical before, and has the potential to lower costs for participants. More open options, working side by side within one standard, is good for everyone building on it.

"x402 was designed to be open and extensible. Any network should be able to plug in and any developer should be able to build on it. Block bringing Bitcoin Lightning to the protocol is exactly the kind of contribution that makes an open standard stronger. It expands what's possible for everyone building agentic commerce." — Erik Reppel, creator of x402 and Technical Steering Committee member, x402 Foundation

We're just getting started. In the months ahead, we'll:

• Continue contributing to Bitcoin Lightning support on x402.
• Bring our experience across payments and consumer products to the Foundation's working groups.
• Continue building open agentic-commerce tools that put these rails to work.

x402 is an open standard, and the best way to shape it is to build on it. If you're a developer working on agentic commerce, we'd love for you to join us — explore the standard, try the Lightning implementation, and contribute to the x402 Foundation.

Let's build open rails for the agentic economy, together.