Circle rolled out Nanopayments on its mainnet on Wednesday, offering gas-free services. $USDC AI agents, APIs, and payment rails designed to power machine-driven commerce.
According to a blog post from the stablecoin issuer, the product allows $USDC Transfers as low as $0.000001 get instant validation and are settled across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Built on top of Circle Gateway, the company’s unified liquidity layer, Nanopayments allows users to deposit $USDC Convert to non-custodial smart contract and authorize transfer via EIP-3009 signature. The system validates and deducts each payment before batching on-chain payment transactions, allowing merchants to provide goods and services within hundreds of milliseconds of approval without waiting for block confirmation.
This product is truly aimed at agent economies, where software agents pay per API call, per second, or per dataset read. Circle cited McKinsey estimates that agent commerce could generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030.
Nanopayments slots are being introduced alongside the x402 protocol, a payment standard that has processed more than $100 million since its launch earlier this year, according to Circle. Nanopayments does not replace existing x402 flows, but adds gas-free economics.
Initial production integrations include data and infrastructure providers Alchemy, Goldsky, and Quicknode.
This mainnet launch follows Circle’s debut on Nanopayments’ testnet earlier this year and expands on the company’s growing agent payments stack.
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