> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling AI agents, APIs, and apps to transact value as seamlessly as they exchange data.

Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)

The intent is to not make companies shoulder the cost of other organizations scraping their content. When it is regular users browsing the cost incurred is trivial. When bots are scraping the entirety of a site, repeatedly, it adds up quickly.

this was in the announcement yes, kind of a buried lede

you get paid in crypto

WHATWG, who sets the HTML standard:

> The central organizational membership and control of WHATWG – its "Steering Group" – consists of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft.