Key points

• Block disclosed the Lightning contribution on 24 September 2026, a day after a repository commit recorded the change.
• The x402 standard revives the dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, originally built by Coinbase and later handed to the Linux Foundation.
• Circle's USDC accounted for 99.3% of x402 payment volume in the second quarter, according to Crypto.news.
• The Foundation's figures show 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume over a recent 30-day window, with 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers.
• Steve Lee, who heads Block's Spiral bitcoin unit, said agents will make billions of small payments needing instant, low-cost, open rails.

Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, has added Bitcoin Lightning support to the x402 payment standard and joined the x402 Foundation, according to News.bitcoin. The company announced the Lightning contribution on 24 September 2026, a day after a repository commit first recorded the change.

The x402 standard revives HTTP status code 402, long reserved for "Payment Required" and never widely adopted. Coinbase built x402 around that dormant code before handing the protocol to the Linux Foundation. Crypto.news reported that the 23 September commit records exact Lightning support tied to a specific network identifier in the public repository.

The protocol had drifted toward a single corporate token. Circle's USDC stablecoin accounted for 99.3% of x402 payment volume in the second quarter, per Crypto.news. Block's contribution adds a Bitcoin layer-two bearer asset to a handshake that has run almost entirely on dollar-pegged tokens, making it a test of whether x402 can support multiple settlement layers.

Lightning joins x402

The Foundation's figures, cited by Crypto.news, show x402 handled 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume over a recent 30-day window, with 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers. Crypto.news noted those numbers cover x402 as a whole rather than Lightning specifically, and that Block published no merchant deployments or AI-agent usage figures tied to its implementation.

Steve Lee, who heads Block's Spiral bitcoin development unit, said agents will make billions of small payments and need rails that are instant, low-cost and open. Cointelegraph reported that Block framed Lightning as suited to the low-cost, high-volume payments agentic commerce will depend on, and placed the company alongside Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Coinbase and the Solana Foundation as x402 backers.

Crypto.news cautioned that the Linux Foundation's April launch notice listed Microsoft only among organizations expressing initial intent, and that Microsoft was not on the named 40-member operational roster published in July. The outlets also split on timing, with Cointelegraph dating the public announcement to Thursday and Crypto.news describing a 24 September statement preceded by the repository commit.

A stablecoin-heavy protocol

Crypto.news reported that the Python implementation for Lightning on x402 still needs to survive real-node testing before going live. Block's roadmap calls for continued Lightning contributions and participation in x402 Foundation working groups, so the practical question is whether that code clears testing and whether developers route real agent traffic through it. Block has published no timeline for integrating Lightning-based x402 payments into Square, Cash App or Bitkey.

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