Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://developers.circle.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Agent Nanopayments, built on Gateway Nanopayments, let your AI agent pay for x402-compatible services in sub-cent USDC. These payments would normally be uneconomical due to per-payment gas costs, but batching them into a single onchain settlement makes high-frequency machine-to-machine commerce viable. Your agent uses Circle CLI to deposit USDC into a Gateway balance, discover services, and pay for them.

​
Get started

Follow the quickstart to deposit USDC, find a service, and make a nanopayment.

​
Use cases

Pay for APIs and services

Pay for x402-compatible APIs on a per-request basis. No subscriptions or per-service sign-ups.

On-demand compute and data

Pay for compute, data, or storage at usage scale. Sub-cent payments make granular billing viable.

Agent-to-agent commerce

Enable machine-to-machine payments at high frequency, with batched settlement keeping costs predictable.

Service discovery

Find x402-compatible services on Circle Agent Marketplace and pay using your agent wallet.

​
Features

Gateway batches many payment authorizations and settles them onchain in a single transaction, amortizing gas across thousands of payments. Your agent pays no per-transaction gas. Learn more about batched settlement.
Nanopayments use the x402 standard, an open HTTP-native payment protocol built around the 402 Payment Required status code. Sellers declare payment requirements, your agent signs a payment payload, and the exchange happens in a single request-response cycle.
Your nanopayments balance can live on any Gateway-supported blockchain.
To integrate x402 and Gateway Nanopayments in your application code instead of Circle CLI, see the Nanopayments buyer quickstart.