The project involves Google’s AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol).
Agentic payments will allow data, computing or digital content to be acquired in real time.
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has taken a decisive step by announcing an integration between its gateway Gateway and the x402 open payments protocol, designed to enable microtransactions with USDC between artificial intelligences (AI).
The proposal, which also involves collaboration with the projects A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) by Googleseeks to create an infrastructure that allows autonomous agents to send and receive micropayments continuously and at a low cost, they said in a statement. release.
Circle’s vision is based on a clear trend: AI systems are evolving beyond simple assistants that respond to linguistic commands. Today, some of them are beginning to function as “agent” entities, capable not only of producing generative information in the form of images and text, but also of executing tasks and making payments on behalf of their users.
For these operations to be viable – such as paying for data, computing or digital content in real time – a fast and flexible payment infrastructure is needed, Circle considers.
“Circle is incubating prototypes and products at the intersection of cryptocurrencies and AI,” the company statement said.
Gateway’s integration with x402 offers just that. This architecture allows you to handle thousands of micropayments per second between agents without gas commissionsthanks to an off-chain batch settlement system and a unified USDC balance that operates across multiple networks.
In practice, this means that AI agents will be able to interact economically without worrying about transaction costs or barriers between networks.
Circle bets on an economy integrated with AI
In addition, the collaboration with Google aims to establish standards to authenticate, authorize and account for payments between AI agents or between humans and artificial intelligences. Google’s AP2 would also include a system of trust standards that regulate the interaction between agents, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
Using mandates and Gateway’s multi-chain infrastructure, the A2A and AP2 projects lay the foundation for an ecosystem where agents will be able to automatically trade and settle services.
Circle assures that this model is not only a technical improvement, but the start of a new autonomous digital economy. In its AI incubator, the company is already developing prototypes for intelligent models to pay for access to data or computing power, demonstrating how programmable money and artificial intelligence can converge.
This and other proposals led by Google, Ethereum and even Coinbase reveal that payments between machines are no longer a laboratory idea, but a reality under construction.