Cardano added to x402 kit for AI agent payments

Cardano has been added to the official x402 software kit, giving developers code to let an app or AI agent pay for an online service with ADA or tokens issued on the network. The Cardano TypeScript release has completed a transaction on a preproduction network. It has not yet operated on mainnet or demonstrated commercial payments at scale. x402 uses the web's largely unused "402 Payment Required" response to build checkout into an internet request. A service returns its price and payment instructions. The agent signs a payment and receives the requested data or computing power after the transaction is verified. An agent preparing a report could use the system to buy a single dataset when needed without a person opening an account, entering card details or paying for a monthly subscription. Coinbase created x402 in 2025 before contributing it to a Linux Foundation-backed organization. The organization's members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google and Amazon Web Services. Solana, the XRP Ledger and several Ethereum-compatible networks already support the standard. Cardano Foundation engineers began with a specification accepted in June. They then built the client and server software needed to request payments, along with a facilitator that verifies and submits them. The initial Cardano release supports TypeScript, and Python support is planned next.