Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has taken a decisive step by announcing integration between its gateways. gateway The x402 Open Payments Protocol is designed to enable USDC microtransactions between artificial intelligence (AI).
Proposals that include collaboration with projects Google’s A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)said in a statement that it aims to build an infrastructure that allows autonomous agents to send and receive micropayments continuously and at low cost.
Circle’s vision is based on the clear trend that AI systems are evolving. Beyond a simple assistant that responds to language commands. Some of them are now starting to act as “agent” entities, capable of not only producing generated information in the form of images and text, but also performing tasks and making payments on behalf of users.
Circle believes that performing these operations, such as real-time payments for data, computing, or digital content, requires a fast and flexible payments infrastructure.
“Circle is developing prototypes and products at the intersection of cryptocurrencies and AI,” a company statement said.
Gateway and x402 integration does just that. This architecture Process thousands of micropayments per second between agents with no gas feesthanks to an off-chain batch payment system and integrated USDC balances that work across multiple networks.
In practice, this means that AI agents can interact economically without worrying about transaction costs or barriers between networks.
Circle bets on AI and integrated economy
Additionally, the collaboration with Google aims to establish standards for authenticating, authorizing, and accounting for payments between AI agents or between humans and artificial intelligence. As reported by CriptoNoticias, Google’s AP2 will also include a trust standards system to regulate interactions between agents.
The A2A and AP2 projects lay the foundation for an ecosystem where agents can automatically trade and settle services using a multi-chain infrastructure of delegations and gateways.
Circle believes that this model offers not only technical improvements; The beginning of a new autonomous digital economy. The company is already developing prototypes of intelligent models in its AI incubator to pay for access to data and computing power, demonstrating how programmable money and artificial intelligence can merge.
This and other proposals led by Google, Ethereum, and even Coinbase make it clear that machine-to-machine payments are no longer a laboratory idea, but a reality in the making.