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The way money moves is about to change fundamentally. AI agents, not humans, are increasingly the ones initiating payments.

They are making transactions, executing trades, procuring services, and settling obligations autonomously and at machine speed. The question is no longer whether autonomous payments will happen, but whether the infrastructure behind them will be fit for purpose when they do.

Quant already builds and runs tokenised deposit infrastructure that is interoperable and programmable by design. That is why we have joined the x402 Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation.

What is x402?

x402 is an open-source payment protocol designed specifically for machine-to-machine transactions. It provides a standard that allows AI agents, automated services, and software to pay each other directly using stablecoins or other digital tokens, without requiring human approval at each step.

The name references HTTP status code 402: ‘Payment Required.’ Reserved in the original HTTP specification decades ago, it anticipated a future where payments would be native to the internet. x402 is the protocol that finally makes that a reality.

This is familiar territory for Quant. Our heritage is in internet technologies, protocols and security, and our vision has always been to connect the internet to money. In 2016, we helped establish the new technical committee ISO TC307 – Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, responsible for developing ISO standards. And in 2026, we helped publish ISO 82098 (ISO/TS 23516:2026), the first international standard for blockchain interoperability.

We have led contributions through the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), building the technical standards at the intersection of finance and the open internet. When foundations form around protocols that matter, Quant is there shaping them.

Connecting the internet to blockchains has been Quant’s mission since our founding in 2015. Joining the x402 Foundation builds on that history, applying the same standards work to the emerging world of autonomous, machine-to-machine payments.

The problem with autonomous payments today

Most autonomous payment infrastructure today operates in a parallel financial system. Stablecoins and crypto-native tokens enable fast, programmable transfers, but they sit outside the regulated banking system. That means they lack the guardrails like deposit protections, settlement finality, and compliance frameworks that institutional finance requires and are there to protect both consumers and money.

For autonomous payments to reach systemic scale, where AI agents are transacting billions across borders on behalf of banks, corporates, and governments, they need to connect to the infrastructure where real economic value moves. A machine-speed payment layer built on unregulated rails will not be adopted by institutions with obligations to regulators, counterparties, and clients.

Where Quant comes in

Major UK banks are already working with Quant through the Great British Tokenised Deposits initiative, building interbank settlement infrastructure with full regulatory compliance and settlement finality. These are not synthetic tokens representing value.

They are commercial bank deposits, tokenised and made programmable, carrying the same trust, protections, and guarantees as traditional interbank payments.

By joining the x402 Foundation, we are connecting these two worlds, internet-native payment protocols and the regulated banking rails that underpin the real economy.

Autonomous agents will settle in tokenised bank money with the compliance, counterparty assurance and settlement certainty that wholesale markets demand, not confined to stablecoins operating outside the banking perimeter. It also closes the risk we have already seen play out, where agents drain wallets in response to a prompt because nothing stands between the instruction and the spend.

Banks authorise transactions and provide safeguards for our money. Agentic AI transactions should be no different, operating within the secure guardrails of bank security and protection.

Fusion: x402-ready from day one

Our Fusion Layer 2.5 multi-ledger roll-up already supports x402 payments out of the box. Fusion apps are designed to deploy in under a day, enabling developers and institutions to have x402-enabled applications running across any public or private network connected to Fusion’s network layer almost immediately.

This is production-ready infrastructure, available now.

Whether the use case is an AI procurement agent settling invoices across jurisdictions, an autonomous trading system executing cross-border FX, or a machine-to-machine micropayment layer for API services, Fusion provides the deployment framework, and Quant’s network provides the institutional connectivity. Currently spanning over 70 networks, that connectivity is available from day one.

Beyond developer tooling

Our decision to join the x402 Foundation goes beyond supporting an open-source protocol. It reflects a considered view that the next generation of payment infrastructure must be interoperable across both internet-native and bank-native inter-bank systems and networks.

The payments industry has spent years discussing programmable money, tokenised assets, and embedded finance. x402 represents the point where those concepts meet a real protocol, with real demand from AI infrastructure behind it. Through Quant, it now has real connectivity to the banking system.

The future of payments is not a choice between decentralised and institutional. It is the interoperability between them. That is what we are building.

Learn more about the x402 Foundation here.