Chris Storaker

We just launched Circle Nanopayments on testnet, and I want to explain the core problem this solves. Let’s say you want to charge $0.01 for an API call, especially for agentic use cases. That seems completely reasonable. But the gas fee to process that payment costs $0.005. You just lost half your revenue to infrastructure. Now imagine you want to charge $0.001 per request. The gas fee is still $0.005. You are now losing money on every single transaction. The payment literally costs more than the service itself. This is why pay-per-use models have not worked at scale. The infrastructure economics prevent it from working. The most natural way to price digital services is by usage. - Pay per API call. - Pay per computation. - Pay per data query. These models are what power agentic commerce, where developers and AI agents need a financial rail built for high-frequency, high-volume payments. Nanopayments solves this through batched settlement. Instead of paying gas for every transaction, Circle’s Gateway aggregates thousands of payments and settles them together in a single onchain transaction. The gas cost is distributed across all of those payments. Here is the result: - 1,000 payments that would normally cost $10 in gas fees now cost $0.01 total. - That brings the cost down to $0.00001 per payment instead of $0.01. Gas is no longer the limiting factor. The way it works is straightforward. You deposit USDC into a Gateway Wallet contract once. That is the only time you pay gas. After that, every payment is just a cryptographic signature. You sign a message authorizing the transfer, but nothing is immediately broadcast to the blockchain. The signature is verified instantly, you receive access to the service, and Gateway batches your payment with thousands of others for settlement later. From a developer perspective, you make a request, the server responds with payment details, you sign the authorization, and you immediately receive the resource. The entire interaction happens in milliseconds. There is no need to wait for block confirmations, and there are no individual gas payments for each request. What this enables is true usage-based pricing. - You can charge $0.001 per API call and maintain margin. - You can implement pay-per-token pricing for AI inference. - You can charge per second for streaming services. Pricing models that were economically impractical because of gas costs now become viable. This is particularly important for AI agents that need to autonomously pay for services. An agent cannot operate if every $0.01 payment carries $0.005 in overhead. When payments cost $0.00001 in overhead, the economics make sense. Agents can pay for compute, for data, and for API access, enabling an autonomous agent economy. We are live on testnet today. Developers can start building with gas-free USDC transfers down to $0.000001. This is what makes usage-based pricing viable. developers.circle.com/gatewa… Reach out to me if you need help building with this.