Circle launches the Nanopayments testnet, supporting gasless micro-payments of USDC as low as $0.000001.

Crypto News: Stablecoin issuer Circle has announced the launch of the Circle Nanopayments testnet. This payment infrastructure supports USDC transfers as low as $0.000001 and enables single transactions with no gas fees, aiming to provide a basic payment layer for the “Agent Economy.” According to the company, Nanopayments is built on the Circle Gateway platform, aggregating thousands of micro-payments through off-chain transactions and delayed batch on-chain settlements, thereby avoiding gas costs for each transaction. Developers can use this to implement scenarios such as pay-per-call, pay-per-use, and machine-to-machine payments. Technically, users or agents sign an EIP-3009 authorization message when initiating a payment. The system verifies the signature, updates the internal ledger instantly, and confirms the payment, while the actual on-chain settlement is completed periodically in the background. Circle states that this solution has been validated through collaboration with open-source robot developer OpenMind. For example, an autonomous robot dog can use Nanopayments to automatically pay for charging fees with USDC. Currently, Nanopayments is live on multiple testnets, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Base, and Polygon.