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Circle Gateway enables gas-free USDC nanopayments by batching thousands of payments into a single onchain transaction. Instead of settling each payment individually, buyers sign offchain authorizations and Gateway settles net positions in bulk, eliminating per-transaction gas costs and making sub-cent payments economically viable. Nanopayments power agentic commerce by giving developers and AI agents a financial rail purpose-built for high-frequency agentic payments at scale.

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Key features

Gas-free transfers

Buyers sign payment authorizations offchain at zero gas cost. Gateway settles in bulk, so neither party pays per-transaction fees.

Sub-cent minimums

Send as little as $0.000001 USDC per payment. Batched settlement keeps fees from exceeding the payment itself.

Crosschain liquidity

Sellers receive payments in their Gateway balance and can withdraw to any supported blockchain instantly.

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What you can build

Enable AI agents to pay autonomously for compute, data, memory, and services. Agents transact at high frequency and extreme granularity, executing thousands of sub-cent payments per minute without gas friction.
Charge per API call, per second of compute, or per dataset access. With transaction costs near zero, fine-grained billing models become practical for the first time.
Build decentralized marketplaces where services, models, and data is priced and traded in real time at sub-cent granularity.
Implement pay-per-second content, micro-rewards, and continuous value flows where traditional payment rails are too expensive to operate.

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How it works

Nanopayments enables the x402 protocol, an open standard built on the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code, by using Circle Gateway’s batched settlement infrastructure. Instead of settling each x402 payment individually onchain, Gateway aggregates signed payment authorizations and settles net positions in bulk. This is what makes sub-cent x402 payments economically viable. The end-to-end flow is:
  1. A buyer deposits USDC into a Gateway Wallet contract (one-time onchain transaction).
  2. A buyer requests a paid resource from a seller’s API.
  3. The seller responds with 402 Payment Required and payment details.
  4. The buyer signs an EIP-3009 payment authorization (offchain, zero gas).
  5. The buyer retries the request with the signed authorization attached.
  6. The seller verifies the signature and serves the resource immediately.
  7. Gateway collects authorizations and settles them in batches onchain, crediting the seller’s Gateway balance.

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Get started

Quickstart: Buy side

Deposit USDC, pay for an x402-protected resource without gas fees, and check your balance

Quickstart: Sell side

Add payment middleware to your Express API and start accepting gasless USDC payments

What is x402?

Learn about the open payment protocol that powers nanopayments

How batched settlement works

Understand how Gateway aggregates payments and settles them onchain