Circle on Wednesday rolled out Nanopayments on mainnet, providing a gas-free $USDC fee rail designed to energy AI brokers, APIs, and machine-driven commerce.
In keeping with a weblog put up from the stablecoin issuer, the product allows $USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 with instantaneous verification, settling throughout Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Constructed on high of Circle Gateway, the agency’s unified liquidity layer, Nanopayments lets customers deposit $USDC right into a non-custodial sensible contract and authorize transfers through EIP-3009 signatures. The system verifies and deducts every fee earlier than batching transactions for onchain settlement, permitting retailers to ship items or providers inside tons of of milliseconds of authorization relatively than ready for block affirmation.
The product is squarely aimed on the agentic economic system, the place software program brokers pay per API name, per second, or per dataset learn. Circle cited a McKinsey estimate that agentic commerce might generate as much as $5 trillion in income by 2030.
Nanopayments slots in alongside the x402 protocol, a fee normal Circle says has processed greater than $100 million since its launch earlier this 12 months. Nanopayments are including gas-free economics to current x402 flows relatively than changing them.
Early manufacturing integrations embody knowledge and infrastructure suppliers Alchemy, Goldsky, and Quicknode.
The mainnet launch follows Circle’s testnet debut of Nanopayments earlier this 12 months and extends the agency’s rising agentic funds stack.
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