Block, the payments company, has joined the x402 Foundation and added Bitcoin Lightning support to the open payment protocol, expanding the company's push into payments for artificial intelligence agents.

In a Thursday announcement, said the Lightning Network, a layer-2 payment protocol that processes transactions off Bitcoin's base blockchain for near-instant settlement at minimal cost, is suited to the low-cost, high-volume payments that agentic commerce will depend on. Agentic commerce refers to transactions initiated and executed by autonomous AI software agents on behalf of users. Because such agents may need to pay a small fee each time they call an API, pull a data feed or complete a digital service, per-transaction cost and settlement speed become deciding factors in whether machine-to-machine payments are practical — the parameters where Lightning specializes.

“Bringing Lightning to x402 is a concrete step toward making Bitcoin everyday money for people and the agents acting on their behalf, and we're excited to help the industry build on it,” said Steve Lee, head of Block's Bitcoin development initiative Spiral.

The announcement was published on Block's official website: Block joins the x402 Foundation to advance open agentic commerce.

x402 is an open payment standard that enables AI agents and web services to autonomously pay for API access, data and digital services. The standard takes its name from HTTP status code 402, the web status long reserved for “Payment Required” but rarely implemented. It was originally introduced by Coinbase in 2025.

Block joins Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and crypto companies including Coinbase and the Solana Foundation in backing the x402 Foundation, which launched in April under the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit that hosts major open-source projects.

The move builds on Block's participation in the Universal Commerce Protocol, an effort to enable AI-driven commerce for small businesses, according to the company's announcement. Taken together, the two efforts place Block on both sides of the emerging agentic-commerce equation: the open payment rail agents use to pay, and the push to bring AI-driven commerce to small businesses.

Source: Cointelegraph