Circle says it launched Nanopayments on mainnet, positioning the service as a gas-free USDC payment rail aimed at “AI agents, APIs, and machine-driven commerce.” In a blog post, Circle frames the feature as a way to move USDC in extremely small amounts and verify payments quickly.
Circle’s Nanopayments enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001. Circle also says verification is instant and settlement occurs across 11 networks, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain.
Circle says the system sits on top of Circle Gateway, its unified liquidity layer. Users deposit USDC into a non-custodial smart contract and authorize transfers using EIP-3009 signatures. Circle also describes a flow where the system verifies and deducts each payment before batching transactions for onchain settlement.
The practical claim here is speed. Circle says merchants can deliver goods or services within hundreds of milliseconds of authorization, rather than waiting for block confirmation. The feature is designed for use cases that generate frequent machine-to-machine payments, which Circle connects to AI agents and API calls.
As with any payment rail tied to smart contracts and batching logic, Nanopayments adds another moving part to USDC transfers. Circle does not provide additional risk details in the excerpt, so readers should treat the product as an asset-linked system with normal smart-contract and integration risks, not a guarantee of performance.