Circle Launches Nanopayments Testnet, Supporting Sub-Cent USDC Microtransactions with Zero Gas

BlockBeats News, March 11th, Stablecoin issuer Circle announced the launch of the Circle Nanopayments Testnet, a payment infrastructure that supports transfers of as low as 0.000001 USDC and enables single transactions to be gas-free, aiming to provide a foundational payment layer for the Agentic Economy.

According to the introduction, Nanopayments are built on the Circle Gateway and use off-chain transaction aggregation and delayed batch on-chain settlement to bundle thousands of microtransactions into a single on-chain settlement, thus avoiding gas costs per transaction. Developers can leverage this to enable pay-per-call, pay-per-use, machine-to-machine payments, and other scenarios.

Technically, users or agents sign an EIP-3009 authorization message when initiating a payment. The system validates the signature, updates the internal ledger instantly, and confirms the payment, while the actual on-chain settlement occurs periodically in the background.

Circle stated that this solution has been validated in collaboration with the open-source robotics developer OpenMind, where, for example, an autonomous robot dog can use USDC to automatically pay for charging via Nanopayments.

Currently, Nanopayments are available on multiple testnet chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Base, and Polygon, among others.