Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 22, 2026
HTTP status code 402 has sat in the specification since the nineties, marked reserved for future use. X Pay built the layer that fills it, and nine investors have just put in $1 million.
Every status code the web uses was given a job in the early nineties. 404 for a page that is missing. 403 for one you are not allowed to see. One of them was left waiting. 402 Payment Required has sat in the specification for thirty years, reserved for a future that had not arrived.
The reason was arithmetic. The web had no way to move money fast enough or cheaply enough to put behind that code. A payment of a fifth of a cent cost more to process than it was worth. Stablecoins changed that, and in July 2026 the x402 standard, contributed by Coinbase, began operating under the Linux Foundation with forty member organisations behind it, among them Visa, Mastercard, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, Stripe and Circle.
The buyer changed before the rails did
The pressure is not coming from consumers. It is coming from software. An AI agent can find an API, read its documentation and decide it needs it, and then it stops, because paying means an account, an API key, a card on file and a human to set it all up. Accounts, KYC forms, one time passwords and 3D Secure all assume a person at the screen.
So the agent either gets handed a key with no spending limit on it, or it does not buy at all. Neither is a payment system.
What X Pay built
X Pay is the gateway that turns the x402 handshake into something a business can run. The server answers with a price, the client signs, the response is released in the same round trip and settles in USDC on Base. Around that sit the parts a merchant actually needs: quotes, verification, replay protection, receipts, payouts, a dashboard and a catalogue where a paid endpoint can be found.
There is a second half that matters more than it sounds. An x402 payment is a signed commitment with no chargeback behind it, so every control in the agent wallet runs before the signature exists, while refusing still costs nothing. A session key carries a ceiling for a single call, a rolling budget, a list of destinations it may pay and a threshold above which a human has to approve. Ask it to pay for something and it signs, asks a person, or refuses and names the limit that stopped it.
Why the money moved
X Pay went live on Base mainnet on 11 September 2026 and has since settled more than 50,000 payments, every one verifiable onchain. The company has now raised $1 million from DCI, Credit Scend, Skyland Ventures, Zerra Ventures, BigBull Capital, ERC20 Capital, EU Capital, Dubai Blockchain Lab and The Crypto Launchpad. Andy Cheung, who was Chief Operating Officer of OKX and now runs K25.ai, has joined as an advisor.
The business model is deliberately unexciting. A flat 1% of settled volume, no setup fee, no monthly minimum, nothing charged on a call that fails. Revenue grows with transactions rather than with token emissions, and the company holds no customer funds at any point.
“We did not invent x402. Coinbase contributed it and the Linux Foundation runs it,” said Johnny Sluijmer, Chief Executive Officer of X Pay. “What we built is the layer that turns a status code into a business somebody can operate. There are millions of APIs that have never been able to charge properly for what they do, because the smallest thing they can sell is worth less than the fee it would cost to sell it. We handed them the till.”
What comes next
The funding takes settlement to BNB Chain and then Solana, pays for an independent security review, opens the API marketplace and funds compliance work in the European Union, including preparation for MiCA. The company is marking its 50,000 transaction milestone with a community giveaway of $50 across ten winners.
About X Pay
X Pay is payment infrastructure for AI agents and APIs, built on the open x402 standard. It lets any HTTP endpoint name a price, accept a signed payment and serve its response inside a single request, with settlement in USDC on Base. X Pay is developed by X-Pay Technologies, registered in the Netherlands, KVK 42149086.
Website: https://x-pay.llc
Live onchain activity: https://www.x402scan.com/server/766676c5-56f8-4b05-ba3d-95a8ce6a3561
Media contact
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