Polygon has tested a new agent payment system that processed over 11 million verified offchain payment updates per second across 25 hubs. This development aligns with a BlackRock research paper arguing that autonomous AI agents will drive crypto demand by using stablecoins for micro-payments. While tech giants like Amazon and Google are building stablecoin infrastructure, a TRM Labs study shows AI agents currently represent only 0.6% to 7.5% of active x402 protocol settlements.
Polygon payment system test results
- ▪Polygon tested a new agent pay channels system that processed over 11 million verified payment updates per second across 25 independently scaling hubs
- ▪Testing the Polygon payment engine directly on one 24-core server produced between 533,000 and 536,000 fully verified payments per second.
- ▪Polygon estimates that a larger fleet of hubs could process more than 100 million payment updates per second based on its agent pay channel architecture tested across 25 hubs
Polygon agent payment system design
- ▪Polygon agent pay channels separate payments from settlement by moving individual payments offchain while settling accumulated states on Polygon in batches.
- ▪The Polygon agent payment system is designed for software that pays for inference, data, API calls, and other services as they are consumed.
- ▪In the Polygon agent payment system, the processing cost for one billion payment updates is approximately $0.15.
The x402 payment protocol
- ▪A TRM Labs study of $52.7 million in Coinbase's x402 protocol settlements found AI agents accounted for only 0.6% to 7.5% of the payment volume
- ▪The x402 protocol uses HTTP's 402 Payment Required status code to let software pay for online resources without a conventional checkout process.
Tech giants integrate agent payments
- ▪Amazon integrated stablecoin payments into its AI cloud tools with Coinbase and Stripe to let agents automatically pay for APIs and data feeds.
- ▪Google built an agent-payments layer extending its Agent2Agent framework to handle cards, stablecoins, and real-time bank transfers with backing from Coinbase and the Ethereum Foundation.
BlackRock research on AI agents
- ▪BlackRock's paper titled "The Machine-Native Economy" suggests that standardized claims on compute capacity could become a significant digital asset use case for financing and programmable settlement
- ▪BlackRock's Digital Assets Research team published a paper arguing that AI agents could drive the next wave of demand for crypto assets.
Debatable claims
- ▪AI agents should be permitted to execute financial transactions without human oversight
- ▪Offchain payment channels are superior to onchain upgrades for scaling blockchain transactions
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