Nanopayments Powered by Circle Gateway Hits Mainnet — BlockRun Is Live On Day One

Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway is live on mainnet today.

11 chains. Gas-free USDC. Payments down to $0.000001. Batched onchain settlement. A non-custodial smart-contract balance that agents can spend from in under 500ms.

We've been running Nanopayments at BlockRun through testnet. Today it graduates — and the agentic economy gets the financial rail it's been missing.

Why Agents Need a New Rail

AI agents do not transact like humans.

They pay per API call, per inference token, per data row, per second of compute, per crawl, per memory write. Sub-cent denominations. Thousands of transactions per minute. Continuous, programmatic, and atomic.

Traditional rails can't price these flows — fixed fees and slow settlement turn every payment into a loss. Standard onchain transfers can't either: gas alone often exceeds the payment amount, breaking sub-cent economics before a product ever reaches scale.

The x402 protocol cracked open the demand — over $100M in payments processed in its first few months. But x402 by itself still settles every transaction onchain. To run real agent traffic at machine speed, you need batched settlement and unified liquidity.

That's what Nanopayments adds.

What Nanopayments Unlocks

Nanopayments sits on top of Circle Gateway's unified balance model. The result is three properties developers have never had in one system:

Gas-free USDC payments down to $0.000001 — sub-cent economics that actually work
Batched onchain settlement — Nanopayments aggregates thousands of authorizations and settles in the background, so every individual payment feels instant
Unified USDC liquidity across 11 EVM chains — Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain — accessible from one balance in under 500ms

And critically, it stays non-custodial. Every payment is executed from a user-signed EIP-3009 authorization. No custody, no platform lock-in, no closed loop.

How the Payment Flow Works

Abstract visualization of AI agents settling micropayments through a unified network

Five steps from request to settlement:

Request. The agent hits a paid endpoint. The merchant returns HTTP 402 Payment Required with payment instructions.
Sign. The agent signs an EIP-3009 authorization for the requested amount. The user — or the agent acting on the user's behalf — never gives up custody.
Submit. The agent re-sends the request with the signed authorization. The merchant forwards it to Nanopayments for validation.
Verify. Nanopayments verifies the signature, checks the user's Gateway balance, and deducts the authorized amount.
Confirm. Merchant gets paid. Agent gets the resource. Done.

Onchain settlement happens in the background, in batches. From the agent's perspective, the payment is instant.

How BlockRun Uses Nanopayments

BlockRun is a unified gateway for AI agents to access premium APIs and pay for them in USDC, per call, with no accounts and no API keys. Today on BlockRun, agents can pay-per-call for:

X / Twitter intelligence — accounts, tweets, search, trends, followers, mentions, analytics
41+ LLMs — GPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama, Mistral, MiniMax M2.7
Web search — Exa-powered
Image and video generation — DALL-E, Grok Imagine, Nano Banana, gpt-image-2
DEX and market data — wallet intelligence, RPC, real-time prices

Every one of those calls is a candidate for a nanopayment. Search results at $0.001. LLM tokens at fractions of a cent. Image generations at $0.02–$0.07. Agents fire off thousands of these per session — and now those payments settle on the right rail.

By moving onto Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway, BlockRun gets:

Gas-free settlement for high-frequency agent traffic — no per-call gas tax eating into margins
One USDC balance, spendable across every supported chain — agents don't manage liquidity per network
Sub-cent floor — pricing that finally matches the cost shape of LLM and API calls
Open-standard composability — Nanopayments is additive to x402, not a replacement, so existing x402 flows keep working

The net effect for builders on BlockRun: per-call payments that are finally cheap enough to not think about. The economics fit the workload.

What This Unlocks Beyond BlockRun

Nanopayments is a payment primitive. The shape of what it enables is broad:

Agent-to-agent and API payments — pay for data, compute, inference, memory, and specialized services in real time, no account creation, no per-tx gas
Usage-based billing — charge by the request, second, or event for AI tools, SaaS features, cloud resources, dev APIs. No subscriptions
Data and analytics markets — monetize RPC requests, wallet intelligence, research feeds, market data with granular pay-per-use pricing
Content and licensing — pay-per-article, pay-per-asset, instant licensing for digital media and creative work
Games, rewards, machine networks — micro-incentives, streaming value, M2M compensation, batched economies

The common thread: workloads where individual transfers are too small for traditional rails, but cumulative volume is real.

Try It Now

If you want to plug Nanopayments into your own x402 flows, start with Circle's quickstart guides. If you want to consume services running on Nanopayments today, BlockRun is the easiest place to start:

# Pay-per-call LLM access — no API key, no subscription
curl https://blockrun.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openai/gpt-5.4",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
  }'

Python SDK:

from blockrun import BlockRun
client = BlockRun()
response = client.chat("openai/gpt-5.4", "Explain x402 in one sentence")

TypeScript SDK:

import { BlockRun } from "blockrun";
const client = new BlockRun();
const response = await client.chat("openai/gpt-5.4", "Explain x402 in one sentence");

Drop-in OpenAI replacement:

export OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://blockrun.ai/v1
# Works with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenClaw — any OpenAI-compatible client

The Rail Is Here

For the last year, the question for anyone building agents that needed to pay for things was: which compromise do you accept? Closed platform with predictable economics, or open infrastructure with broken micropayment math.

Nanopayments removes the choice. Open standards. Sub-cent economics. Unified liquidity. Non-custodial. Live on mainnet, today.

If you're building agents that transact, this is the financial layer.

Read Circle's announcement: Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway.

Build with us: blockrun.ai.