Quack AI today announced that its signature-based execution layer, Q402, is now live on the Avalanche C-Chain, a move the startup says will make agent-driven applications feel native in one of the fastest L1 ecosystems. In a post on
Quack AI says the release brings three key features to the Avalanche developer community: a “Zero Gas Barrier” that enables ERC-20 settlements without requiring users to hold AVAX for gas, a “Sign-to-Pay” flow that decouples user intent from transaction execution, and a production-ready, auditable execution structure for what the company calls the emerging agent economy.
From plate to settlement
At its core, Q402 uses signature-based authorization: a single cryptographic signature represents a user’s intent and can be pushed to execution by relayers and facilitators. That model collapses the traditional three-step UX—sign, fund gas, submission—into a unified sign-then-settle experience that Quack AI believes is much better suited for automated agents and large-scale, real-world flows.
The Quack AI documentation extends Q402 as an implementation of an open x402 standard that combines delegated execution with governance intelligence and policy enforcement, indicating that the project aims to be more than a UX band-aid and instead a foundational layer for autonomous on-chain systems.
For Avalanche builders, the most immediate benefit will likely be reduced onboard friction. Removing the need for end users to hold native gas tokens simplifies payments, microtransactions, and other UX-sensitive flows common in consumer apps, games, and tokenized financial services.
Sign-to-Pay also allows service providers to separate the approval step from the settlement mechanisms, opening up opportunities for more secure delegated workflows where institutions or multisig setups can sign the intent and the trusted infrastructure handles the rest. Quack AI’s announcement highlights both performance and auditability, two selling points for teams that need to balance automation with compliance.
The company included a link to the contract deployment on Snowtrace in its announcement and invited developers to inspect the live transaction and deployed code. While the broader Q402 roadmap includes integrations and verification tools, the live C-Chain deployment marks the first production footprint on Avalanche and could act as a springboard for additional collaborations and relayer networks.
Observers in the space have already noted Quack AI’s broader push toward verifiable execution, and recent reporting highlights partnerships and ecosystem work intended to combine execution guarantees with cryptographic proof systems to reduce assumptions of trust in autonomous systems.
There are questions that naturally follow any new abstraction of execution: how will the relayer economy work at scale, who will bear the settlement risk, and what audit tools will be standard for verifying agent reasoning and behavior? Quack AI’s materials suggest these are active design goals.
The company is positioning Q402 not only as a UX improvement, but also as a governance-aware layer that can capture and enforce policies in execution paths. Whether that vision becomes a reality will depend on builder adoption and the emergence of robust enabler networks that can securely translate signed intentions into on-chain results.
For now, Avalanche users and developers have a new primitive to experiment with: an execution layer that aims to make authentication the standard and make execution feel native. If Q402 delivers on its promises, it could accelerate the shift from manual, gas-centric workflows to delegated, auditable agent economies and provide a template for how other chains can support signed intents and gas extraction at scale.