The x402 Foundation launched Thursday as a neutral, vendor-agnostic standards body for AI agentic payments — bringing together Visa, Stripe, Google, Mastercard, Coinbase, Ripple, and dozens of others to build an open protocol for machine-to-machine commerce on the internet. The goal is to create a universal payment standard that lets AI agents transact across any network, wallet, or currency without being locked into a single company's infrastructure — the same way HTTP standardized data transfer without requiring everyone to use the same browser. Coinbase's x402 protocol, which already has 69,000 active agents and 167 million transactions, provides the technical foundation; the Foundation exists to take governance of that standard out of any single company's hands. The launch amounts to a bet that the open-standard approach — rather than any proprietary solution from Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Stripe alone — will define how the $10 trillion agentic economy settles payments by 2030.
Self-custody solved one problem — who controls the keys — but left another wide open: how do you prove identity, manage permissions, and establish trust across a decentralized internet without handing control back to a platform? Staghunt argues that the missing layer isn't a better wallet. It's a verifiable identity and access protocol that works across chains, apps, and AI agents without a central authority in the middle. As agentic commerce scales and the x402 standard takes hold, the question of who authorizes the agent to act on your behalf becomes the defining infrastructure problem of the next internet.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted a lengthy critique of hardware wallets Thursday, arguing that the devices create a false sense of security — most thefts happen through social engineering and seed phrase compromise, not device exploits, making the hardware itself largely irrelevant to real-world attack vectors. Bitcoin held steady near $65,000 after South Korea's central bank cut rates by 25 basis points to 2.25% in a surprise move, citing slowing growth and a weakening won. The rate cut — South Korea's first since January — briefly lifted risk appetite across Asian markets before fading.
