Why Your AI Agent Needs a Wallet: USDC and Nanopayments — Harshal Bhangale, Circle

[music]

>> Good morning, everyone.

So, um I've had the pleasure of uh

meeting a lot of folks at uh the booth

here over the last couple of days, and

the interactions have been great, uh but

one question kept uh coming up, which

was

Circle is a stablecoin company. So, why

is a stablecoin company at an AI

engineering conference?

And well, uh the answer to that is

fairly simple,

because

Circle issues uh USDC, which is the

world's largest regulated stablecoin.

And we've

built over the years expertise in making

payments simpler and cheaper.

And it turns out that's one of the

bottlenecks for your AI agents.

So, when you often think about making AI

agents smarter, we think about better

models,

uh more tool calls,

complex orchestration,

but

where your agent actually

in practice actually halts is when it

hits a paywall or when it has to pay for

something.

Then you have to step in, either create

an account, sign up, or, you know,

manage API keys.

So, that's where uh the limitation is,

and that's the gap that I want to talk

about today.

So,

yeah, I'm Harshal, and I'm an engineer

on the agentic product team at Circle.

So, let's sort of take a step back and

see how we got here.

We believe that the agentic economy is

already here.

So,

how are uh

you know, uh

we In 2023 we interacted with agents via

like prompts, uh your ChatGPT and stuff

like that. We got a little bit better.

In 2024 we built workflows.

2025 was all about MCPs, skills, and

orchestration.

And we believe this year, 2026, is when

agents actually start paying for

services that they want.

And the signals are promising.

Just in the last 30 days,

uh agents have transacted with paid API

endpoints,

uh and the volume is about like $24

million. Uh

over X102.

And 99% of it has been settled in USDC.

While this number may look small in

terms of volume in the broader

landscape,

it's only about to get larger.

So, what is X102? Um essentially, X102

is

a way where agents can uh pay for their

the resources that they want because

the server essentially returns a 402

header

and with the details of how they want

the payment to

proceed. And then the agent just signs

um an authorization from the crypto

wallet and then pays for the resource

and retries the request again. So,

that's

in X102 in a nutshell and we'll see that

in action in a live demo.

But then, the question is

why do the traditional payment rails not

work and why do the agents get stuck?

So,

the answer is simple, uh because for the

last 30 years we built the internet

around one customer

and that was humans.

Right? Um so, we built payment schemes,

uh monetization strategies, all catered

towards how humans interacted. So, you

had your sign-up flows, add your credit

card, uh put in your information, and

manage your API keys, but agents just

don't function that way.

Agents

want to like come in and grab that piece

of data, resource, compute, inference,

whatever, and just

uh you know, and they have the ability

to even like consume knowledge at a

scale that humans just cannot.

I'm sure like you have seen sessions

where it's able to like just scrape

through hundreds of web pages, and um

then it just like stalls because it

can't like reach a particular endpoint,

and it skips over it.

So,

then you could think, "Oh, yeah, just

give it a credit card." or something

like that. So,

while that is possible,

um these agents,

uh because they consume so much data as

they go,

it's um

they pay in fractional amounts, so tiny

amounts, uh but at a very high

frequency.

Uh and credit cards and their fees are

just like not sustainable for this kind

of like economic model. Um you cannot

pay like 3% uh each time an agent tries

to make a one-cent transaction. And the

reason these transaction amounts are so

small is because on the sell side or on

the merchant side, they've realized that

these paywalls were actually catered for

humans, and now there's an entirely

different customer base which is trying

to like access their data, and they just

want like a subset of the data. So, you

could monetize that as a seller by just

offering that, by wrapping that in a

uh you know, in a paywall, and saying,

"Hey, I take one,

pay me 10 cents and grab this data."

And that's why these are

tiny um microtransactions, but highly

frequent. So, because the agents are

just like making these API calls

constantly.

So, what do these agents need? The

agents need um payments to work like the

internet.

So, they have to be real time,

low cost, programmable, and always on.

And that's why we've built the Circle

agent stack. So, it's the full stack

platform for the agent tech economy. And

what we mean by that, let's look at it

with a live demo.

Um yeah, wish me luck.

Okay.

So, I'll just explain

uh what I'm trying to

if I can get the

terminal. Okay.

Okay.

Let's

Mhm.

Pull it.

Yeah, I don't know.

Excuse me, can I

Yeah, I tried but

it's just not

I don't know where the placement of the

desktop is.

>> Can you escape out of this?

>> [snorts]

>> Okay.

Thank you. So, so what we have over here

are

two sessions. One is your regular cloud

code and on the other on the right hand

side is a cloud code that comes equipped

with Circle agent wallet. So, it has a

wallet which is funded and has the

ability to like make uh has the ability

to pay for premium content. And now uh

let me actually

just uh

quickly uh

add a task

to this.

Yep.

And run it.

So, I'll explain what I'm trying to do

over here, which is

Yeah, so So, the task I'm giving Claude

on and it's the same task on both the

terminals is

plan my trip for the FIFA World Cup

final.

So, just, you know, give me summary of

flights,

hotels, logistics. Also, like what are

the odds of like my favorite team

Argentina being in the final? Who is it

going to play? And stuff like that. Um

and also

what's the ticket prices in the

secondary market? How is the experience

of other people who've

actually been to the stadiums?

And

are there any FYIs and stuff like that?

Grab all of that.

Send me an email. And if possible uh

make me a make a phone call and tell

confirm that all of this has been

researched and you know, sort of brief

me on the summary.

So, we'll see like what's happening on

on both the terminals here.

And

Sorry, it's a bit hard to navigate. So,

as you can see, um

the left the vanilla Claude code has

spun out like a bunch of sub-agents. And

it's going about doing its research.

Similarly, on the right-hand side um

it's

actually like uh going through

the wallets and making like um

paying for all of these

uh premium content and we'll see like

what the results of it are.

So, as you can see, it's trying to make

a phone call to find sorry, an API call

to Stable and Rich. Um and it's paying

from its wallet.

It's set up a guardrail of like, "Hey,

max amount is 15 cents." The beauty of

uh

having an agent with a wallet is

you

sort of build these guardrails into the

wallet. And you don't have to as a human

approve every single transaction

because that would just not scale

because these agents are just making

these ones and five cents, 10 cents

transactions. You want to like enforce

those guardrails which is hey, this is

the max amount you can send spend per

session or this is the max cap you can

do per day and stuff like that. So,

the agent is still spending within the

guardrails that you set but it is

autonomous enough to like make these

individual API calls.

So, let me just

look at what

the vanilla one is

looking up and doing some research for

hotels.

Yeah, um

flights are coming in.

Also like in the prompt like try to like

tell the agent to

wrap this whole thing up within 6 to 8

minutes in the interest of time. So,

let's see if we're able to like get an

email and a phone call done

in the same time.

Let me also walk you through

what the agent's doing if I can grab.

Yep, as you can see over here the agent

was able to like make an API call to

the poly market data

via a provider called Block Run and

it provided a query

and again

set the max amount guardrails

and is now passing all the results.

>> All right.

So,

let's go back to the

main subject main agent here.

Yep.

And this is where I think you'll see on

the left-hand side that the agent gets

stuck because

the agent just does not have the ability

uh it cannot send out an email natively.

So, what it's doing is it's using my uh

it's just like adding a draft into my

Gmail account uh that is logged in, but

it just cannot send it to someone. Uh

whereas the other agent on the

right-hand side will just be able to use

um a provider, pay it, and send an

email.

Now, let's see like

this one's uh the

the other agent is also like

uh is about to like send an email and

place the call, so let's see.

Does.

>> Okay.

So,

as the

I think the left agent, the vanilla

cloud goods finished, and as you can

see,

it's sort of like made a confession that

yeah, it cannot have It does not have

the ability to make a phone call. So,

it's just like providing me the

highlights over here in the terminal

itself. Um and

now, uh whereas on the right-hand side,

the email's been sent. Now, let me try

to

actually show you the email that we got,

I wish.

Grab this somehow.

Okay, I'm going to make

make the phone call.

Okay.

Just going to grab my

thing here, and then

let's look at the email.

So,

yep, there we go.

So, I got this email. Oh, this is the

old one. Let's see the new one.

Yep.

This is the one that we just received

like 2 minutes ago.

And

yeah, it has all the

details that it was able to like find,

including like getting to the stadium,

open stadium and maps. It was able to

like,

you know, find all of these.

And then,

what to expect by looking at like Reddit

tickets, etc.

So, I'll wait for the call but in the

interest of time it takes sometimes

a few minutes for the call to come in

but

let's see and I'll move on. So, how does

this work uh

in the background?

Is

Yeah, let's get back to this. Let's

Yeah, so so as you can see like the

agent on the right hand side with the

wallet was able to just make a bunch of

these API calls and pay for it. While

blockchains make all of these things

theoretically possible, there are there

are also some bottlenecks because uh

even the most efficient blockchains

have a gas fee and these small

transactions just don't scale because

the gas fee will again be a significant

sort of

fraction of the actual transaction. But

it is important to have gas fees because

they prevent the network from spam and

abuse.

Um and blockchains also have some

throughput limitations because there are

other use cases that run on blockchains

and block space is shared

infrastructure. So, the problem for

agents is unpredictable latency and

degraded performance under load.

So, what we did for that

is

essentially uh we built a new um

infrastructure layer on top of our intra

product called gateway. So, it's called

nano payments. It's built for sub cent

transaction sizes for as low as one

micro cent.

Uh it supports

um it is gas free for the seller and

it's instantly cross-chain.

And

the way it works is you essentially you

just fund um

your wallet and then Oh, sorry. While I

explain this, let's listen to the actual

call that came in.

And

>> Hi Harsha, here is your World Cup final

trip

>> I don't know if it's part of it.

>> at MetLife Stadium. Fly SFO to either

EWR or JFK non-stop. SFO is showing live

arrival delays today, so build buffer.

>> Awesome.

Can you tell me how do I get to the

stadium from my hotel?

>> On match day, take NJ Transit to

Secaucus Junction, then the Meadowlands

Rail Spur direct to the stadium. Budget

about an hour before receipt.

>> Thank you. I'll read the rest of it in

my email. Thank you.

>> You're welcome. Have

>> All right. So, that was just a quick

demo of like how you can have like AI

agents.

Um if they're equipped with a wallet,

they can do a lot of things

with the

as opposed to an agent that does not

have a wallet. So,

I have a couple of more minutes, so I'll

just walk you through how this

technology works underneath.

So,

if you have a wallet and you funded it

with USDC, it's very easy because Circle

works with a bunch of providers to

on-ramp your actual US dollars into

USDC. And from there, you can deposit

the funds into a smart contract. The

next thing it does is

the agent just has to like sign these

off-chain authorizations,

which are essentially cryptographic

signatures saying, "I

am paying this address this particular

amount of money."

And then

the server just has to like relay this

to Circle and within a few hundred

milliseconds,

this the server knows

the merchant knows that, you know, the

user has the funds and is able to

release the actual resource that the

agent requested. And with this, you

avoid the

issue of like you know latencies and

stuff that are associated with actually

settling every single transaction on

chain and this

the agents are able to like pay for

things

at the speed at which they operate. So

in conclusion the the the way the stack

would work is you have Circle agent

wallets which give you the ability to

equip your agents with wallets.

The agents have can now hold their

money, spend that money autonomously but

within the guardrails that you set. The

wallets enforce those guardrails and

then on the sell side the merchants are

able to like just

wrap their endpoints and resources and

monetize it with a few lines of code

using our SDKs.

Then

USDC and nano payments is the layer

underneath it which sort of helps settle

these transactions at the speed at which

agents operate which is sub second. So

and that this is how it scales

and you can give it a try yourself by

going to agents.circle.com.

It's just a couple of clicks and

you will have your agent equipped with a

wallet and ready to like you know make

these phone calls and things like that.

So yeah, thank you.