Circle has just launched Nanopayments in full production. The service lets AI agents send stablecoin payments down to a millionth of a dollar without transaction fees — removing the last major cost barrier to machine-to-machine payments.
Image: Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle.
Micropayments have been an unsolved problem on the internet for over two decades. The idea that you can pay a fraction of a cent to read an article, call an API or download a data point has existed since the early days of the web, but has never worked economically. The reason is simple: the fees for processing a payment have been higher than the amount itself. A bank card typically takes around 30 cents per transaction, and even ordinary stablecoin transfers on blockchain cost fees that far exceed what you are paying when the amount is a tenth of a cent. What Circle has now launched in production is a system that bypasses this cost barrier — and thereby makes micropayments economically viable for the first time. That this is happening now is no coincidence: AI agents acting on behalf of humans or other machines generate exactly the kind of sub-cent transactions that make the problem acute.
Circle launched Nanopayments on testnet on March 10, and is now putting it into production on eleven blockchains simultaneously: Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain and World Chain. The company states that several developer companies have already deployed the solution in real-world use, including Alchemy, Quicknode, Goldsky and the agent-focused AgentCard.
The mainnet launch arrives alongside the maturing of competing infrastructure. The x402 protocol, which lets AI agents pay any service provider without first creating an account, has according to Circle processed over 100 million dollars in payments within a few months. Circle Nanopayments is built to work alongside x402 — not as an alternative, but as the settlement layer underneath the standard.
The technical move is that Circle batches thousands of individual transactions and settles them collectively on the blockchain, while Circle covers the gas cost. For the developer, the per-transaction fee disappears. The user — in practice often an agent — deposits USDC in a smart contract on Circle Gateway, and the payment flow then proceeds via signed authorizations without the funds moving on-chain at every individual transfer.
The seller receives immediate confirmation of the payment and can deliver the good or service in under half a second, while the actual settlement happens in the background. In practice, the system separates execution from settlement — a model that delivers machine speed on the experience side and blockchain security on the settlement side simultaneously.
One of the clearest examples Circle has highlighted comes from its collaboration with OpenMind, a developer of open-source robotics software. An autonomous robot used Nanopayments to pay in USDC to charge itself. It is a small but illustrative picture of what agentic commerce means in practice: an autonomous machine that initiates payment, receives immediate confirmation and continues its workflow — without a human in the loop.
The example may seem niche, but it shows the underlying logic Circle is building for. The company describes the use cases as agent-to-agent payments, consumption-based billing, data marketplaces, micro-licensing of content and machine-to-machine economies — all scenarios where individual transactions are too small to bear traditional payment infrastructure.
Circle explicitly positions Nanopayments as open infrastructure, in contrast to closed platforms that keep agent payments within proprietary ecosystems. It is a clear strategic line: USDC is to flow across apps, services and chains, and settlement is to be chain-agnostic.
The tension between open and closed infrastructure is the central debate in agentic commerce right now. Stripe last week launched streaming payments in stablecoin on its own blockchain Tempo, a more controlled model where Stripe owns the entire settlement layer. Both companies point to the same problem — that traditional payment networks are not fit for machine economics — but solve it in fundamentally different ways. Which model wins, or whether both coexist, will likely be determined by where developers and merchants actually build.
Circle cites McKinsey estimates that agentic commerce could reach 5 trillion dollars in turnover by 2030. The figure is approximate and should be treated with caution, but the direction is consistent with what other infrastructure players are reporting. Traffic from large language models to Stripe's developer documentation has grown tenfold in a year, and x402 volume is growing rapidly from a low base.
For Circle, Nanopayments is a natural next step in a broader strategy where USDC is positioned not just as a digital dollar for crypto trading, but as a programmable settlement unit for the entire internet economy. The mainnet launch is the clearest signal yet that the company believes the agentic economy is ready for production — and that the settlement layer beneath it must be built now.
Sources: Circle, x402.org, McKinsey
