USDC nanopayments for agents
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Agentic payments in action
Nanopayments makes autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions economical at scale with gas-free transfers as small as $0.000001. Our collaboration with OpenMind signals what’s next: robots that operate as independent actors.
The industry-standard rail for AI agents has arrived
Open, agent-led infrastructure
The agentic economy requires open infrastructure
The financial rail for AI agents
The agentic economy will run on trust, speed, and scale. With Nanopayments, we deliver on all three — making value exchange seamless, programmable, and more efficient than ever before.”
The autonomous, machine-driven economy is here
Ship machine-scale payments
Agentic payments
Transact at high frequency. Nanopayments lets agents act autonomously at internet speeds.
Usage-based billing
Nanopayments enables pay-per-use billing models, with AI agents charged only for what they use.
Machine-to-machine commerce
Agentic robots require functional M2M marketplaces to pay for data, electricity, and other needs.
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Build the agentic economy with Nanopayments
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FAQs
Nanopayments is a feature of Circle Gateway that enables users to transfer any portion of their Gateway balance, ranging from as little as $0.000001 and up to $1M. By leveraging Gateway’s gas-free balance transfer mechanism, it makes previously uneconomical payment amounts viable.
Instead of settling each transfer individually, Gateway’s balance transfer feature batches thousands of transactions and settles them in a single commitment. This enables a gas-free experience, reduces the effective cost per transfer, and significantly improves efficiency, particularly for high-frequency use cases.
Crosschain transfers today are often fragmented, costly, and operationally complex. Nanopayments addresses this by enabling developers to move value across Gateway-supported chains in a gas-free and capital-efficient way. For micropayments, it makes sub-cent transfers economically viable. For larger payments, it reduces friction by avoiding unnecessary per-transfer onchain settlement when funds are already held within Gateway.
Any Gateway users can access Nanopayments. While Nanopayments is useful for machine- or agent-initiated sub-cent payments and high-frequency transfers, it can also support payments of any size when developers want a more affordable solution for moving value across supported networks.
Instant verification is powered by Circle Gateway’s unified balance model. Once an agent funds its Gateway balance with USDC, it can authorize payments using a signed EIP-3009 message.
The merchant submits the signed authorization to Nanopayments for verification. Nanopayments immediately validates the signature, checks the agent’s available balance, and deducts the amount from the unified balance. The merchant receives real-time confirmation and can deliver the service instantly.
Onchain settlement occurs later in batches, keeping balances aligned while preserving a sub-second user experience.
Gateway’s unified balance model allows users to use their Gateway-deposited USDC across supported networks. They can initiate nanopayments across any Gateway-supported chain, and once the batch is confirmed, the full balance becomes instantly available and can be minted on any supported destination chain.
No. Nanopayments is a permissionless feature accessible through Circle Gateway, and its design preserves Gateway’s non-custodial model. Transfers must be explicitly authorized by users, and Circle at no time has unilateral control over user funds.
After the batched settlement is finalized, recipients can access their funds and immediately transfer them to any Gateway-supported chain. Batched settlements are committed periodically throughout the day.
Nanopayments is designed to be fully compatible with the x402 v2 standard. It preserves the standardized request/response structure of x402 while providing a specialized backend for high-frequency, sub-cent settlement.