The NEAR Foundation has officially joined the x402 Foundation, the Linux Foundation body dedicated to advancing open, accessible, and transparent infrastructure for the agent economy.
This alliance places NEAR alongside global infrastructure leaders and payment providers defining how agents will transact, including Amazon Web Services, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa. NEAR joins as a builder of key agent infrastructure, including cross-chain liquidity, confidential execution, private inference, and agent-to-agent discovery and coordination that is needed alongside x402’s payments protocol.
The Full Stack for Agents, from Payments to Private Inference to Cross-Agent Coordination
x402 gives agents an open, shared way to pay, and is an important building block for the agent economy with its extensibility across blockchains and existing payment infrastructure. Alongside an open payments layer, an agent needs several capabilities to truly act on its own: a persistent identity it controls, liquidity across every chain and asset, inference that keeps its inputs private, execution that runs without broadcasting what it touches, a way to find and hire other agents, and settlement that is fast and final at machine speed.
These critical capabilities are usually owned by different, uncoordinated parties. NEAR is building infrastructure that intends to bring them together as one system that works alongside x402: universal liquidity and confidential execution through NEAR Intents, private inference and a secure agent harness through NEAR AI, agent-to-agent discovery and coordination through the NEAR Agent Market, and scalable, quantum-resistant settlement through NEAR Protocol. The intention is that an agent can pay through x402 and rely on NEAR infrastructure for everything around that payment.
NEAR is open infrastructure that is intended to support any chain, any model, and any on/off-ramp an agent may use. NEAR Intents settles across more than 30 chains and 180 assets. NEAR AI provides TEE-enforced private inference around 40+ frontier models an agent may choose to reason with. Whichever chain, model, or payment rail an agent reaches for, NEAR aims to support it, providing an agnostic and universal coordination layer for the agent economy.
Building the Open Standard, in the Open
The infrastructure agents will run on is being decided now, and standards chosen in this early cycle will hold for a long time. The early architecture of the internet was chosen once and lived with for decades, and the rails that govern how agents move value and prove their work will likely harden the same way.
NEAR Foundation has joined the x402 Foundation to help contribute to those rails in the open, and to connect an open payment protocol to the full stack agents depend on. When the standard is open and the infrastructure around it is neutral, the value agents create can return to the people whose capital, data, and intent they act on.
“Open standards are required for an open agent economy. NEAR provides open infrastructure across the whole stack, so an agent can reason with any model and transact across any chain, while keeping users’ data private. We joined the x402 Foundation to help make agent-native payments a shared standard, while bringing the full stack of NEAR AI agentic infrastructure to the growing x402 ecosystem."
— Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder, NEAR