Circle has introduced Nanopayments, positioning USDC for AI agent use cases that require transfers below one cent. The company said the model supports payments as small as $0.000001 by combining offchain aggregation with onchain settlement, a structure aimed at avoiding the fee, latency, and throughput limits of traditional payment systems.
The push comes as more internet activity shifts toward autonomous software. These agents can request APIs, pay for compute, and access digital resources without direct human input, but they need payment infrastructure that works at high frequency and at very low values. Conventional rails struggle here. Fixed fees and settlement delays make many of these transactions uneconomic before they even start.
USDC positioned for machine-to-machine billing
Circle argues that stablecoins are better suited to this environment because they can handle extremely small-value transfers. That makes machine-to-machine payments and granular billing models more practical. Developers can build continuous payment flows around usage rather than relying on credit cards or account-based setups tied to older financial systems.
To support this kind of interaction, Coinbase built the x402 protocol, which revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code for automated payments. One of its main features is that agents can transact without opening accounts or entering credit card details first.
How the x402 payment flow works
Under the model described by Circle, an agent requests a resource and receives payment instructions in return. The agent then signs an authorization and resubmits the request together with proof of payment. The goal is to standardize the way agents and merchants handle paid access across the web instead of forcing each service to design its own payment path.
Nanopayments itself is built around aggregating many tiny transactions offchain before settling them onchain in batches. That removes per-transaction gas costs and improves efficiency. It also gives the system more predictable throughput during periods of network congestion. For sub-cent transactions, that detail matters. If every payment carried full onchain cost overhead, many of these transfers would not be viable.
Unified balances, EIP-3009 authorizations, and batch processing
Circle said the system uses a unified balance funded through a smart contract. Agents sign EIP-3009 authorizations for each payment, and those authorizations are verified instantly. Transactions are then grouped and handled inside a Trusted Execution Environment before final onchain settlement.
Circle also said the design simplifies interoperability across blockchains. Sellers work with a single API, while balances can move across supported networks. For participants that are not crypto-native, that reduces operational complexity and makes automated AI-driven payments easier to deploy in practice.