TLDR:

• Circle Nanopayments enables gas-free USDC transfers as small as $0.000001, built on Circle Gateway infrastructure.
  
• Batched on-chain settlement bundles thousands of transactions, with Circle covering all gas costs at the settlement layer.
  
• The x402-compatible system lets agents pay merchants instantly with no account creation or credit card required.
  
• A robot dog autonomously paid for its own recharging in USDC, marking a real-world agentic commerce milestone.

Circle Nanopayments is now live on testnet, enabling gas-free USDC transfers as small as $0.000001. Built on Circle Gateway, the payments primitive is designed for the emerging agentic economy.

It allows developers to build pay-per-call APIs, real-time compute billing, and machine-to-machine payment flows.

Sub-cent transactions, previously unworkable due to high gas fees, are now economically viable at scale. Circle has introduced batch on-chain settlement to remove per-transaction costs entirely for developers.

How Circle Nanopayments Solves the Sub-Cent Problem

Traditional payment rails, built decades ago, were not designed for high-frequency sub-cent transactions at agent scale. Fixed fees and overhead make ultra-small payments unworkable on legacy systems.

Even modern onchain transactions face barriers when settled individually. On low-cost blockchains, fees for a $0.0001 transfer can reach 1,000% to 5,000% of the payment amount.

Circle Nanopayments resolves this through off-chain aggregation and batched on-chain settlement. Thousands of transactions are bundled into a single onchain batch, reducing each transaction’s gas cost to zero.

Circle covers the on-chain costs at the settlement layer. This lets agents transact nearly instantly, with settlement handled seamlessly in the background.

When an agent initiates a payment, it signs an EIP-3009 authorization message and submits it to the API. The system validates the signature and adjusts the agent’s internal ledger balance accordingly.

The merchant then receives instant confirmation and can release goods or services right away. Actual onchain settlement occurs periodically and does not interrupt the workflow.

Circle announced the launch on X, noting the system follows the x402 standard. The x402 standard lets any agent pay any merchant without creating an account or adding a credit card.

Circle stated: “The financial rail for the agentic economy is here.” This removes sign-up friction for agents operating across multiple autonomous workflows at once.

Real-World Testing and Supported Chains

Circle Nanopayments was recently tested through a collaboration with OpenMind, an open-source robotics software developer. An autonomous robot dog used the system to pay for its own recharging in USDC.

The robot initiated payment, received near-instant confirmation, and continued operating while settlement ran in the background. This shows early-stage agentic commerce functioning effectively in a real environment.

As of February 2026, the payment system operates on the testnets of 12 blockchain networks. These include Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Optimism, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, HyperEVM, Arc, and World Chain.

It works on any Gateway-supported EVM chain, giving developers broad flexibility. Developers can check the official documentation for the most current list of supported networks.

Use cases for this payment primitive cover pay-per-crawl search, real-time compute billing, and autonomous service marketplaces.

Each model depends on the ability to transfer fractions of a cent instantly and without gas fees. The system allows developers to build products around true sub-cent value exchange. Previously, such business models were not economically practical at this scale.

Developers can access the testnet now to build and test sub-cent payment flows in live conditions. The testnet phase gives builders time to validate applications before any mainnet deployment takes place.

Circle has positioned this as core payments infrastructure for agentic commerce. Each payment carries programmable value with no per-transaction gas cost required from the developer.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) may hit $150 by August, according to BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.

Key takeaways:

• CEX volume rotation and demand for macro-linked markets, including oil, are boosting HYPE’s bull case.

• A cup-and-handle setup is hinting at an initial breakout toward $50.

CEX to DEX rotation can grow HYPE prices fivefold

In a post published on Monday, Hayes said that if Hyperliquid keeps pulling derivatives volume away from centralized exchanges (CEX) and expands its product suite, HYPE could climb roughly fivefold from around $30.

To make it happen, Hyperliquid’s 30-day annualized revenue run rate must rise to $1.40 billion by August from $843 million in March.

Such growth is achievable if the platform captures another 3.96% share of derivatives volume from centralized exchanges after already absorbing roughly 6% as of March.

Hyperliquid uses about 97% of its revenue to buy HYPE tokens from the open market. Therefore, most of the money the platform makes is used to buy its own token, which can support the price if trading activity keeps rising.

That structure, Hayes said, boosts HYPE’s odds of rising toward $150.

Tokenized oil boom: Hyperliquid’s bull case

Hayes’s bullish call came as the US–Iran war turned oil into Hyperliquid’s top-traded assets.

On Tuesday, CL-USDC, its crude oil-linked perpetual pair, reached about $1.29 billion in 24-hour volume, overtaking ETH-USDC at roughly $1.24 billion, showing traders are increasingly using the platform to bet on traditional assets, not just crypto.

The trend also supports Hayes’s broader HIP-3 thesis. HIP-3 lets users launch perpetual markets permissionlessly by staking HYPE, and Hayes said newer listings tied to oil, gold, silver and major US indexes are already gaining traction.

Related: Oil retreats from 25% surge as G7 weighs emergency reserve release

He argued that HIP-3 now contributes nearly 10% of Hyperliquid’s revenue and could grow revenue by 160% in the coming months if the DEX keeps offering macro assets like gold and oil.

Last year, Maelstrom, a family office fund tied to Arthur Hayes, predicted declines in HYPE prices due to $11.90 billion in token unlocks. Since then, the Hyperliquid token has fallen by roughly 40%.

Still, Hayes has also made several high-profile calls that did not play out.

That includes Bitcoin targets of $250,000 by the end of 2025 and $200,000 by March 2026, as well as a January 2025 call for TRUMP memecoin to hit a $100 billion market cap by inauguration.

HYPE technicals hint at initial breakout toward $50

From a technical perspective, HYPE may rally toward $50 in March or by April, based on a cup-and-handle pattern.

A cup-and-handle forms after a rounded recovery and a brief consolidation. It confirms when price breaks above the neckline resistance, with upside typically measured by the pattern’s maximum height.

Applying the technical rule to HYPE gives a measured upside target of around $50 if the price breaks decisively above the $35.50 neckline resistance. If the pattern plays out, it will result in gains of more than 40% from current levels.

Conversely, a pullback from $35.50 could push the HYPE price initially toward $30, a level aligning with the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement line and the 50-day exponential moving average (50-day EMA, the red wave).