[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Circle launched “Nanopayments,” a micro-payment USDC payment infrastructure for AI agents and autonomous software, on a testnet.

According to a recent report by The Defiant, Nanopayments is built on Circle Gateway. It focuses on environments where AI agents must make fast payments in small units, including pay-per-call APIs, usage-based billing and machine-to-machine marketplaces.

Existing payment infrastructure makes transactions below 1 cent effectively impossible because of fixed fee structures. Even low-cost blockchain transactions can carry fees that exceed the payment amount. Circle explained it addressed the problem by batching transactions off-chain and then settling them on-chain in bulk.

For developers, gas fees per transaction are effectively zero, and Circle covers settlement costs at the batch layer.

Payments follow the x402 open standard. Agents can pay any merchant without creating an account or registering a credit card. When an agent initiates a payment, the Nanopayments application programming interface verifies the authorization and the merchant receives immediate confirmation. Actual on-chain settlement is carried out periodically in the background.

In a blog post, Circle introduced a proof-of-concept example in which an autonomous robot dog pays USDC via Nanopayments and recharges itself.

The testnet supports multiple blockchains including Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Sonic.