Circle launches Nanopayments testnet, supporting gasless micropayments of USDC as low as $0.000001

Stablecoin issuer Circle has announced the launch of the Circle Nanopayments testnet, a payment infrastructure that supports transfers of as low as $0.000001 USDC and enables gas-free transactions for single payments, aiming to provide a foundational payment layer for the "Agent Economy."

According to the introduction, Nanopayments is built on the Circle Gateway and aggregates off-chain transactions with delayed batch on-chain settlements, packaging thousands of micropayments into a single on-chain settlement to avoid gas costs for each transaction. Developers can leverage this to implement pay-per-call, pay-per-use, and machine-to-machine payment scenarios. Technically, when a user or agent initiates a payment, they sign an EIP-3009 authorization message, and the system verifies the signature to instantly update the internal ledger and confirm the payment, while the actual on-chain settlement is completed periodically in the background.

Circle stated that this solution has been validated in collaboration with open-source robot developer OpenMind, for example, an autonomous robotic dog can automatically pay charging fees using USDC through Nanopayments. Currently, Nanopayments is available on multiple testnet chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Base, and Polygon test environments.