Circle rolled out Nano Payments on the mainnet on Wednesday, offering a gas-free offering $USDC payment rail designed to enable AI agents, APIs and machine-driven commerce.
According to a blog post from the stablecoin publisher, the product makes this possible $USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 with instant verification, and are handled via Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Nanopayments are built on top of Circle Gateway, the company’s unified liquidity layer, and let users make deposits $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 focused on the agentic economy, where software agents pay per API call, per second or per data set read. Circle cited a McKinsey estimate that agent trading could generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030.
Nanopayments sit alongside the x402 protocol, a payment standard that Circle says has processed more than $100 million since its launch earlier this year. Nanopayments add gas-free economy to existing x402 flows instead of 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 expands the company’s growing stack of agentic payments.
This article was written using AI workflows. All of our stories are curated, edited, and fact-checked by a human.