The Coinbase engineering executive who invented the fast-spreading AI-friendly payment protocol x402 wrote Friday that he has left the crypto exchange to start a company.
Erik Reppel, who was head head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform, wrote in a post on X that "there's an idea in my head I need to get into the world."
Reppel had served as the chief spokesman for the x402 protocol, which has been growing rapidly as a way for AI agent developers to add payment support for their projects.
The effort has become a key strategy pillar for Coinbase, the biggest U.S. crypto exchange, which has promoted the capacity of its in-house blockchain, Base, to handle micropayments – seen as a crucial element of the white-hot development realm of agentic commerce.
Reppel did not specify what his new company will do.
Brian Armstrong weighs in
In April, Coinbase contributed x402 to the Linux Foundation, which supports open-source software projects, calculating that the protocol stood better chances of becoming a native payment layer for the internet as an open standard than as a proprietary system.
(Bradley Keoun, publisher of DeAI News and founder of Distro Media, famously used x402 as a key component of Distro's landmark "agentic newsstand" pilot project in March. That demonstration proved how x402 could be used in combination with the Distro Publisher MCP server to purchase a premium article published on Distro, directly from within a user's Claude Desktop. The project used Coinbase Developer Platform infrastructure as well as a Base test network.)
Reppel said in his post that he will continue to be involved with x402 as a member of the technical steering committee at the Linux Foundation and will remain an advisor to Coinbase on agentic commerce.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong replied to Reppel's post: "Bullish on whatever you do next! You're a rare talent."
Yuga Cohler will take over as head of engineering, Reppel said.
Cohler confirmed in a separate post on X that he had stepped into the role of head of engineering for Coinbase Developer Platform. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has a bachelor's degree in computer science and music from Harvard University and speaks Japanese fluently.