Circle is incubating prototypes and products at the intersection of crypto and AI. First up: machine-to-machine micropayments and our work with ecosystem participants.
Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase — one defined by agency. Instead of passively responding to prompts, AI systems are beginning to act on their own: researching, reasoning, and transacting on behalf of their users. These agentic systems will increasingly need to pay for what they consume, whether that’s data, compute, content, or API calls. Yet today’s payment infrastructure wasn’t designed for machines making thousands of transactions per second.
Agentic AI represents a shift in how economic activity happens online. Instead of users initiating every transaction, autonomous systems will need to settle small payments continuously and intelligently. A model might pay another model to access data, or an AI assistant might compensate a service for executing a task. For that vision to work, payments must be lightweight, composable, and frictionless.
Circle Gateway and x402
Lightweight, composable, and frictionless payments require an open payment protocol. Circle is contributing to the x402 ecosystem, pioneered by leading organizations including Coinbase and Cloudflare. Designed for machine-to-machine payments, x402 extends the internet’s financial layer to accommodate autonomous agents operating at speed and scale. At Circle, we’ve been exploring how USDC and Circle infrastructure can strengthen this emerging standard, beginning with our proposal to connect Circle Gateway with x402. We’ve shared a detailed proposal of the integration on the x402 GitHub and we invite developers, researchers, and ecosystem participants to review and contribute.
Gateway already provides chain-abstracted USDC across supported blockchains. Paired with x402, Gateway delivers programmable, multichain settlement designed for machine-scale use cases. Gateway’s new batching feature, available soon on testnet, allows thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of transactions to be processed together, achieving higher throughput for micropayments at dramatically lower cost, addressing two fundamental challenges that agentic systems demand:
- Avoiding gas on micropayments: Executing payments directly onchain typically incurs gas fees for transactions, making high-frequency micropayments impractical. Gateway’s new batching feature will enable deferred settlement by bundling transactions offchain and settling them onchain, eliminating per-transaction gas costs while preserving finality at a fraction of the cost and latency.
- Unlocking crosschain agency: As the x402 ecosystem evolves, agents will operate across multiple blockchains. A seller on one chain must be able to accept payment from a buyer on another. Gateway's chain-abstracted design makes this possible by enabling a unified USDC balance. This creates a truly open, interoperable environment where agents can transact freely across chains.
Gateway x402 and Google’s A2A and AP2
Building on this work, Circle is also participating with Google on their A2A (Agent2Agent) and AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), leveraging the Gateway x402 integration to support both. Gateway’s chain-abstracted USDC and batching capabilities make it a natural foundation, providing the throughput and efficiency needed for large-scale autonomous transactions. These protocols represent complementary layers in the agentic payment stack. A2A enables direct agent-to-agent payments, and AP2 connects agents with humans and services.
In contributing to AP2, Circle is participating alongside Google and other ecosystem participants to advance standards that enable both autonomous and hybrid payments.
Imagine an AI research assistant that pays for each article it reads in USDC on any supported chain, or a compute-intensive model that dynamically compensates providers for processing power in real time with USDC. With Gateway x402 and integration into A2A and AP2, developers can explore these interactions and flows. We’re developing a demo to showcase these capabilities and use cases.
AI at Circle
These are the initial public initiatives to emerge from Circle’s incubator for open, hands-on R&D at the intersection of crypto and AI. Our focus with AI is to explore the frontier through real prototypes, share those learnings with the community, and help establish the standards that will underpin the next era of internet-native finance. When a prototype shows promise, it may advance to become a production-ready product, enabling participants to build and scale with Circle’s AI-driven solutions.
By developing in the open, we invite collaboration from across the ecosystem — builders, researchers, and participants who share the belief that payments should be as open and intelligent as the systems using them. From USDC to Arc, every step in our journey has been about enabling a more open, programmable financial infrastructure. With our AI R&D, we’re extending that mission to a new class of participants: AI agents capable of transacting, learning, and creating economic value on their own with stablecoins.
Get in touch and get involved
To get involved, visit the x402 GitHub to review and comment on our proposal, or reach out directly to the team at [email protected]. Together, we can build the payment rails that let humans and AI agents participate seamlessly in the same internet economy.
