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Circle Launches Nanopayments on Testnet

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Circle Launches Nanopayments on Testnet

Circle has launched Nanopayments on testnet, offering developers a new infrastructure layer for ultra-small, gas-free USDC transactions.

The product is built on Circle Gateway and designed to serve the emerging agentic economy, where AI agents and autonomous software need to make rapid, sub-cent payments for services such as pay-per-call APIs, usage-based billing, and machine-to-machine marketplaces.

The core challenge Nanopayments aims to solve is an economic one. Traditional payment rails carry fixed fees and overhead that make sub-cent transactions impractical, while even low-cost blockchain transactions can impose fees that dwarf the payment itself.

Circle’s approach sidesteps this by aggregating transactions off-chain and settling them on-chain in batches, effectively reducing the per-transaction gas cost to zero for developers, with Circle absorbing the settlement costs at the batch layer.

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The system follows the x402 open standard, allowing any agent to pay any merchant without creating an account or adding a credit card. When an agent initiates a payment, it signs an authorization that’s validated by the Nanopayments API, the merchant gets instant confirmation, and actual on-chain settlement happens periodically in the background.

In a blog post, Circle highlighted an early proof of concept in which an autonomous robot dog used Nanopayments to pay for its own recharging in USDC, a glimpse at what fully autonomous economic actors might look like.

The testnet supports multiple blockchains, including Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Sonic.

The launch comes amid explosive growth in the stablecoin sector, whose market capitalization now exceeds $314 billion, up 37% from $228 billion a year ago, according to DeFiLlama.

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Circle’s USDC is the second-largest stablecoin with nearly $79 billion in circulation, according to Coingecko.

The company has been steadily building out its platform beyond USDC issuance. In spring 2025, it launched the Circle Payments Network, a platform for real-time, low-cost cross-border payments using stablecoins. It later unveiled Gateway, a chain abstraction tool that lets USDC holders access a unified balance across supported blockchains, and introduced Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for USDC transactions.

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Crypto World

Months More Bitcoin Consolidation Expected as Long-term Holder Activity Decreases

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Bitcoin Touches 9-Month Low as Selling Hits Crypto, Metals, and Energy


Bitcoin prices could continue to consolidate for a while yet, as network activity indicates decreasing momentum amid reduced selling pressure. 

Bitcoin didn’t remain above $70,000 for long and has fallen back below it in early trading on Wednesday morning. Resistance was too strong, and it has returned to the middle of its five-week range-bound channel.

Long-term holder activity has decreased significantly, declining to levels typically seen during bear markets, according to CryptoQuant analyst ‘Darkfost’ on X on Wednesday.

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They added that this decline in activity “reflects a reduction in selling pressure, which likely helps Bitcoin continue consolidating.”

Months of Boring Sideways Markets

Analyst ‘Daan Crypto Trades’ observed that it has been another week where BTC’s price closed below the 200-week exponential moving average, a very long-term trend indicator. He added that it tried to get back above it on this push early in the week, but failed, falling back below $70,000.

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Meanwhile, the bull market support band is “moving down rapidly and will meet the price relatively quickly, as long as it keeps hovering around here,” he added. This could result in months of consolidation and sideways markets.

“My base case is still that we will spend quite a while in this larger, let’s say ~$60K-$80K region. Could easily take several months before we see a decisive move again, I think.”

“Back and forth. Back and forth. That’s the current rhythm of Bitcoin,” commented MN Fund founder Michaël van de Poppe on Tuesday. “No breakout, but the longer it stays in here, the stronger the move will be,” he added.

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Meanwhile, ‘RedHotTrade’ said Bitcoin is “compressing between $60,000 and $70,000 and “multiple technical patterns are forming at once.”

“When several patterns point to the same breakout level, the move that follows is often explosive.”

Analyst Matt Hughes observed that BTC price keeps getting rejected just above $71,000, “so we can’t celebrate a real breakout until weekly candles close above this level.”

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Crypto Market Outlook

Crypto markets are flat on the day with total capitalization remaining at $2.45 trillion, close to where it has been since early February.

Bitcoin was rejected at $71,600 on Tuesday and had fallen back to $69,600 at the time of writing. Meanwhile, Ether prices remained tightly coiled just above $2,000, slowly eroding previous minor gains.

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Aave Founder Says DAOs Must Evolve

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Aave Founder Says DAOs Must Evolve

Stani Kulechov, the founder of decentralized lending platform Aave, says decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) need a rethink, namely, how much tokenholders vote on as opposed to input from leaders.

His comments came in the wake of governance disputes about the future of the protocol.

Kulechov said in an X post on Tuesday that DAOs, in their current form, are “extraordinarily difficult” to operate because of internal conflicts and proposals that can take weeks of forum posts, temperature checks and multiple votes to pass.

DAOs are intended to operate without core leadership, with all decisions made through community consensus; however, average participation rates in DAOs are estimated at 15% to 25%, which can lead to issues such as power centralization and ineffective decision-making.

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“DAOs also become politicized very quickly and it’s easy for voting to become about attention. Participants take sides, lean toward the loudest voices, and form political alliances to get their own proposals passed later,” Kulechov said.

Source: Stani Kulechov

“It can often feel like we took the worst parts of corporate bureaucracy and removed the parts that create accountability in the name of decentralization. But that doesn’t mean DAOs are doomed. They are far from that,” he added.

DAOs should keep what works, leave the rest

Kulechov said the path forward needs to involve DAOs keeping what they “got right” and fixing “what they got wrong.”

He proposes that rules should stay in the code, DAOs typically resolve decisions through smart contracts on a blockchain, the treasury should stay visible to everyone, and token holders should still have input on major decisions.

Related: Vitalik Buterin proposes using AI to strengthen DAO governance

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However, Kulechov argues that going forward, token holders shouldn’t vote on everything, because running the protocol day-to-day requires teams and leaders, not thousands of voters.

“Someone needs to wake up every morning with the full context in their head and make hard calls,” he said.

“The difference is that their decisions and performance are all on-chain and transparent, and token holders can fire the team when objectives are not met. Accountability is verifiable, and that is what separates this from a traditional company. There is no vendor lock-in.”

Aave governance proposals spark exit

Kulechov’s comments come amid a proposal, the “Aave Will Win Framework,” which passed a temperature check on March 1.

Source: Aave

Soon after, a major governance delegate, the Aave Chan Initiative, announced it would wind down its involvement with the Aave DAO over concerns with the governance standards and voting dynamics during the proposal process.

In January, another proposal to transfer control of Aave’s brand assets and intellectual property to its DAO failed, prompting renewed debate within the Aave community over the protocol’s long-term direction and governance structure.

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Magazine: The debate over Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is over: Benjamin Cowen