The stablecoin issuer’s new payment rail enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001, targeting AI agents that pay per API call, per second, or per dataset read.
Circle on Wednesday rolled out Nanopayments on mainnet, offering a gas-free USDC payment rail designed to power AI agents, APIs, and machine-driven commerce.
According to a blog post from the stablecoin issuer, the product enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 with instant verification, settling across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Built on top of Circle Gateway, the firm’s unified liquidity layer, Nanopayments lets users deposit USDC into a non-custodial smart contract and authorize transfers via EIP-3009 signatures. The system verifies and deducts each payment before batching transactions for onchain settlement, allowing merchants to deliver goods or services within hundreds of milliseconds of authorization rather than waiting for block confirmation.
The product is squarely aimed at the agentic economy, where software agents pay per API call, per second, or per dataset read. Circle cited a McKinsey estimate that agentic commerce could generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030.
Nanopayments slots in alongside the x402 protocol, a payment standard Circle says has processed more than $100 million since its launch earlier this year. Nanopayments are adding gas-free economics to existing x402 flows rather than replacing them.
Early production integrations include data and infrastructure providers Alchemy, Goldsky, and Quicknode.
The mainnet launch follows Circle’s testnet debut of Nanopayments earlier this year and extends the firm’s growing agentic payments stack.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
