The foundation backing NEAR blockchain said Tuesday it has joined a group of firms backing x402 agentic payments, under a standard originally developed by the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase but now gaining traction as an open-source project.
The vote of confidence carries additional heft since NEAR is led by Iliia Polosukhin, who was a pioneer in AI development before he switched to focus on blockchain.
DeAI News reported in April on Coinbase's contribution of x402 to the Linux Foundation, with an initial lineup of participants, and in June we covered the foundation's expanding role as a standards-setter for the agent economy, where it now stewards both x402 and the Model Context Protocol.
In a separate press release on Tuesday, the Linux-overseen group of participants issued its own press release announcing the operational start of a new x402 Foundation that will steer the standard.
"The x402 Foundation will allow developers, financial institutions, cloud providers and other community members to collaboratively shape the protocol’s development," according to the release. "This open structure ensures that payments remain highly secure and adaptable, supporting multiple payment types, from traditional cards to stablecoins, without vendor lock-in."
NEAR's new cohort
In a blog post, NEAR Foundation said it will now sit "alongside global infrastructure leaders and payment providers defining how agents will transact." The post named Amazon Web Services, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. Notably, it didn't mention any of the other blockchain companies or projects listed on x402 Foundation's membership roster, such as Coinbase, Solana Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Circle or MoonPay.
"Open standards are required for an open agent economy," Polosukhin said in the post. "We joined the x402 Foundation to help make agent-native payments a shared standard, while bringing the full stack of NEAR AI agentic infrastructure to the growing x402 ecosystem."
NEAR said it joins as a builder of infrastructure surrounding payments, pitching cross-chain liquidity and confidential execution through NEAR Intents, private inference through NEAR AI, agent-to-agent discovery through the NEAR Agent Market, and settlement through NEAR Protocol.
Intents settles across more than 30 chains and 180 assets, and NEAR AI offers hardware-enforced private inference across 40-plus models, the foundation said.
NEAR is listed as a general member, a tier below the premier members that hold appointed seats on the x402 governing board. Premier membership costs $200,000, according to the foundation's website.
(HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft directly to DeAI News on DistroVerse. I used the native (non-AI) DistroVerse editing interface to make some edits, and I personally checked all the facts prior to publication. I used ChatGPT with a custom project to generate the story illustration.)