Circle Launches Gas-Free ‘Nanopayments’ on Mainnet Across 11 Blockchains
Circle on Wednesday rolled out Nanopayments on mainnet, providing a gas-free $USDC cost rail designed to energy AI brokers, APIs, and machine-driven commerce.
In accordance with a weblog publish from the stablecoin issuer, the product allows $USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 with prompt verification, settling throughout Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Constructed on prime of Circle Gateway, the agency’s unified liquidity layer, Nanopayments lets customers deposit $USDC right into a non-custodial sensible contract and authorize transfers by way of EIP-3009 signatures. The system verifies and deducts every cost earlier than batching transactions for onchain settlement, permitting retailers to ship items or providers inside a whole lot of milliseconds of authorization slightly 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 cost commonplace Circle says has processed greater than $100 million since its launch earlier this yr. Nanopayments are including gas-free economics to current x402 flows slightly than changing them.
Early manufacturing integrations embrace information and infrastructure suppliers Alchemy, Goldsky, and Quicknode.
The mainnet launch follows Circle’s testnet debut of Nanopayments earlier this yr and extends the agency’s rising agentic funds stack.
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