With Cardano (ADA) supporting the x402 payment standard on September 21, it became possible to build AI agents that pay for online services with native token ADA. Shortly after the news, the ADA price rose by about 4%, reaching its highest level in four months.
Key takeaways
With the official x402 toolkit, apps and AI agents can now pay for web services in ADA.
Payment intermediaries have only processed transactions on the testnet so far, and mainnet support remains to come.
As competing chains have already processed millions of x402 payments, Cardano is the follower.
Cardano, x402 integration status
Cardano is now included in the official x402 software kit, enabling developers to build applications and AI agents that use ADA and tokens on the network to pay for web resources.
On September 21, the Cardano Foundation announced the release of an npm package and presented a development environment that can be used with a single installation command. The foundation’s engineers said that after the Cardano network specifications were merged into the x402 repository around September 9, they directly contributed to the client, server, and payment facilitator components.
After developing x402 with Coinbase in 2025 alongside Cloudflare and **Stripe**, Coinbase transferred the protocol to a foundation under the Linux Foundation. The standard is backed by sponsors such as Visa, Mastercard, Google, and Amazon Web Services, and it’s been praised for bringing the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code—reserved since the early days of web design—into real-world use after decades.
However, mainnet support has not started yet. As of now, payment facilitators have only processed real transactions on Cardano’s pre-production network; there have been no confirmed examples of ADA spending at a commercial scale. At this point, only development tools for TypeScript are provided, and Python support will be added in future versions.
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ADA price breakout, intensifying payment competition
Within 24 hours after the announcement, the ADA price rose by about 4%, reaching its highest level in four months. The market is interpreting this not as another roadmap promise, but as an expansion of real use cases (utility). One chart trader said ADA has broken upward through a multi-year resistance range, analyzing that this move could signal a major trend reversal.
Nevertheless, Cardano appears to have entered the increasingly competitive market late.
The XRP ledger (XRP) has handled more than 1.4 million AI agent transactions through x402. However, it’s hard to determine from the figure alone how many individual agents or commercial services it actually corresponds to. As of September, Coinbase said its own developer platform processed more than 100 million x402 payments combining Layer 2 Base and Solana (SOL). Casper, a smaller network, has also been running payment facilitators on mainnet since June.
x402 diffusion timeline
x402 spread rapidly from the very first year. It started as a side project by Coinbase, but soon transitioned to a governance model involving major card issuers and cloud business operators. **Amazon Bedrock AgentCore** introduced x402 in May, enabling agents to search, retrieve data, and pay for backend services in USDC (USDC) without human involvement. As of July, AI-linked payments on the XRP ledger have surpassed a cumulative 1 million transactions, and a hub sponsored by **Ripple** brings together agent tools and development resources in one place.
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