Just when you thought stablecoins alone were about to replace legacy payment processors charging ridiculous layered fees, news has emerged that the same Web2 interface can be enhanced to enable faster and cheaper payments.
Folks in emerging economies have, for years, been forced to pay a premium when making international payments, but businesses and ordinary users can now breathe a sigh of relief with x402, an effort by Coinbase.
Money runs the world, so they said. A June 2025 Grand View Research report forecasts the digital payment solutions market to cross the $361 billion mark by 2030. At this pace, it will grow at a rate of +21.4% CAGR between 2025 and 2030.
(Source: Grand View Research)
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Will x402 Bring Changes To Payment Processing?
If so, will the X402 protocol play a big role in enabling smooth payments? To understand this and determine whether the tech stands a chance, it is essential to know what X402 enhances to qualify as a game changer.
For starters, x402 is an initiative backed by Coinbase, the global exchange, that aims to create a web-native payment protocol that enables, among other things, AI agents and dapps to transact using stablecoins on any smart contracts-enabled platform.
Ideally, dapps and AI agents using the x402 should run on scalable, low-fee networks, including Base or MegaETH, for example. In this way, all transactions will not only be executed instantaneously but fees will be so low that there will be no impact on the end user. There is no need for logins or KYC.
With x402 gaining traction and a perfect scalable blockchain platform, which can be a native mainnet or layer-2, it is easy to see why the protocol, which is open source, can enable agentic commerce. Here, a swarm of AI agents can interlink, enabling autonomous payments for services, data, and more.
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Will x402 Power Global Economy By 2030?
And there are signs that this is where everything is headed.
Two things are here to stay: Stablecoins and AI.
It took years before stablecoins found mainstream adoption and regulatory endorsement.
Meanwhile, AI was received with open arms right after the first iteration went live. The explosion of OpenAI and ChatGPT proved how useful this technology is, explaining the multi-billion-dollar investments by titans, including Meta and Microsoft.
If convenient, trustless, and open payment is the name of the game going forward, it is easy to see why x402 will be a go-to protocol. A16z Crypto projects that autonomous transactions could cross the $30T mark by 2030.
As such, if x402 becomes the choice platform and evolves to be the backbone for AI-to-machine payments, there is little doubt that it would effectively restructure a large portion of the internet’s business model.
Trackers show that x402-powered transactions now total over 3.1M, generating over $3.5M in volume. Of this, there are over 162,000 buyers and 30,000 sellers.
(Source: x402 Scan)
With more adoption, developers will look to enhance the open source protocol. This, in turn, will draw more partners.
Founding developers include Cloudflare and Coinbase, but in recent months, the tech has found support from Google. It signals strong tech industry backing as the drive for adoption and standardization grows.
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Coinbase x402 To Power Global Economy By 2030?
- Coinbase x402 is an open-source protocol
- x402 finding rapid global adoption
- AI explosion is fueling more developments of agents
- Will x402 power the global economy by 2030?
The post Coinbase’s X402 Agentic Payments Network Will Power Global Economy By 2030 appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
