Agentic Payments Alliance: 26 Members, 7 Also in x402

A second industry body for agentic payments launched on 18 August. The Agentic Payments Alliance was convened by Rain, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company, and named 26 founding members including Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly.

HaiPay covered the first one, the x402 Foundation, on 13 August. Comparing the two membership lists shows seven companies in both — and shows that the people who actually write x402's specification are not in the new alliance at all.

What launched, and who convened it

The alliance was announced from New York on 18 August in a release issued by Rain. Its stated purpose is to guide the development of agentic commerce infrastructure through shared research and frameworks, testing of emerging standards for agent identity and authorisation, and regulatory advocacy. Members also get early access to Rain's Agentic Startup Program accelerator.

The release describes the body as "a working coalition, run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company", with members setting the charter and mission together. No membership tiers are described and no fees are mentioned. Organisations wanting to join are directed to an email address.

Farooq Malik, co-founder and chief executive of Rain, is quoted saying no single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone's behalf.

The 26 named founding members are Avalanche, Basis Theory, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinflow, Crossmint, delta Network, Episode Six, Evertec, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Kala, Lithic, Mastercard, Monad, PayOS, Rain, Remitly, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Sardine, Shift4, Solana, Turnkey, Uniswap Labs, Visa and Yuno. Rain, the convenor, is counted among them.

Seven companies sit in both bodies

The x402 Foundation is the other body in this space. It is hosted by the Linux Foundation, launched in July, and its members page listed 49 organisations when HaiPay checked it on 19 August.

Figure 1. Two agentic payments bodies, seven companies in both. Sources: Rain press release of 18 August 2026 for the founding member list; x402.org members page and HaiPay reporting of 13 August 2026 for tiers, fees and the Technical Steering Committee. Overlap identified by HaiPay after normalising legal-entity names. Both lists are point-in-time.

Setting the two lists side by side and normalising legal-entity names — MasterCard Incorporated against Mastercard, Solana Foundation against Solana, Circle Internet Contract Services against Circle — produces an overlap of seven: Circle, Fireblocks, Fiserv, Mastercard, Monad, Solana and Visa.

That leaves 19 of the alliance's 26 founding members with no listed x402 membership, and 42 of x402's 49 members outside the alliance. The two bodies share the card networks, a processor, a stablecoin issuer, a custody firm and two blockchains, and very little else.

The companies writing the x402 spec are not in the alliance

The more telling absence is at the technical layer.

x402's Technical Steering Committee names three participating organisations: Coinbase, Cloudflare and Stripe. Those three are the companies with hands on the specification. None of them appears among the alliance's 26 founding members.

The absence runs the other way too. Rain, which convened the alliance, does not appear on the x402 member list.

Neither absence implies anything about the relationship between the two bodies, and neither has been explained by anyone. But it means the overlap that exists is between members rather than between the people doing the standards work.

The two are built on opposite models

The structural contrast is sharper than the membership one, and it is visible entirely in each body's own published material.

x402 is a foundation under a neutral host, with three membership tiers, a top annual fee of $200,000 for Premier members, appointed board seats for those members, and a Technical Steering Committee that names the organisations doing the work. It publishes a specification built on HTTP status code 402.

The alliance publishes no tiers, no fees, no board and no named technical body. Its stated activity is to test emerging standards rather than to author one, and the release does not claim it will produce a specification.

Those are two different instruments. One is a standards organisation with a paywalled governance ladder. The other is a coalition assembled around work happening elsewhere. Both are legitimate structures, and each answers a different question — but only one of them currently owns a technical artefact.

The alliance's centre of gravity is crypto infrastructure

Coverage of the launch led with the card networks, which is understandable given the names. Reading the full roster gives a different weighting.

Classifying the 26 by what each company principally does, the largest bloc is blockchain and digital-asset infrastructure: Avalanche, Chainalysis, Circle, Crossmint, Fireblocks, Monad, Rain, Rialo by Subzero Labs, Solana, Turnkey and Uniswap Labs, which is eleven names. Card networks, acquirers and processors account for five: Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Shift4 and Evertec. Card issuing and programme management adds Episode Six and Lithic. Orchestration and gateway firms account for Yuno, PayOS, Coinflow, Kala and delta Network. Sardine covers fraud, Basis Theory tokenisation, and Remitly remittances.

That classification is HaiPay's, not the alliance's, and companies rarely fit one box cleanly. But on any reasonable reading the roster is weighted towards crypto infrastructure and convened by a stablecoin company, with the two card networks as two names among 26.

What the x402 numbers look like today

One point of continuity is worth recording, because it is the only public activity data either body publishes.

The x402 site reported 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million of volume over the trailing 30 days when HaiPay checked on 19 August, alongside 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers. Dividing volume by transactions gives an average of about 32 cents, unchanged from the figure HaiPay reported on 13 August.

The alliance publishes no equivalent figures, which is expected for a body six days old.

What is established and what is not

Established: the Agentic Payments Alliance launched on 18 August with 26 named founding members, convened by Rain, with no disclosed tiers or fees and a stated remit that includes testing emerging standards and regulatory advocacy. Seven of those 26 also appear on the x402 Foundation's member list. The three organisations named on x402's Technical Steering Committee are not among them, and Rain is not an x402 member.

Not established: whether the two bodies intend to coordinate, whether the alliance will produce or endorse a specification, what membership will cost if anything, how decisions will be made inside a coalition with no published governance, whether any founding member has committed resources beyond its name, and whether either body's roster will look the same in a month.

The narrow reading is that agentic payments now has two industry bodies, launched about a month apart, sharing seven members and no technical leadership, and that the one with a specification is not the one that just made the headlines.