Hassan Maishera
On Tuesday, the NEAR Foundation and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced via X that they have joined the X402 Foundation.
Per the announcement, 38 organizations spanning finance, cloud, and payments have joined to develop the x402 protocol under vendor-neutral governance, keeping the payment layer of the internet open, interoperable, and free from lock-in.
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.
SDF will hold a seat on the x402 Foundation Governing Board, with the CPO representing SDF in the protocol's open governance.
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.
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. The network runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Nightshade, which aims to provide dynamic scalability and stabilize fees.
NEAR combines three core elements: User-Owned AI, which ensures agents act in users’ best interests; Intents and Chain Abstraction, which eliminate blockchain complexity for seamless, goal-driven transactions across chains; and a sharded blockchain architecture that delivers the scalability, speed, and low-cost execution needed for real-world AI and Web3 use.
NEAR Protocol is unique because it was purpose-built for AI from day one—not retrofitted after the fact. Founded by AI researchers, its architecture was designed to support intelligent systems at scale. With Nightshade sharding, NEAR can handle billions of transactions without congestion or rising fees. Developers can build using familiar languages like JavaScript and Rust, onboard users without wallets, and tap into other blockchains without bridges through Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents. Its progressive security model, low-predictable fees, and native support for AI agents make NEAR the most practical blockchain for building the next generation of autonomous applications.
NEAR is trading at $2.0, up 0.2% in the last 24 hours.
Stellar is an open-source network with the mission to "create equitable access to the global financial system." Stellar is maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2014.
The Stellar network is a decentralized, fast, scalable, and uniquely sustainable blockchain built for financial products and services. The network launched in 2014 with the purpose of connecting the world's financial systems by offering a protocol for payment providers and financial institutions that facilitates near-instant global payments and currency exchanges. In 2024, Stellar released protocol 20, enabling full-featured smart contracts to the network. The network is transforming international payments and remittances through safer, faster, and more affordable solutions, and connecting real-world assets to DeFi to enable comprehensive everyday financial services.
The Stellar network’s native digital currency - Lumens (“XLM”) - is used to pay the network’s transaction fees. (XLM can also be used as an intermediate currency for operations. How it works: the protocol converts money in a few seconds, first into XLM, and then into the requested currency.)
XLM is up 1.5% in the last 24 hours and now trades at $0.1818 per coin.
