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Visa and the on-chain data analysis platform Artemis previously jointly released the report "Agentic Payments from the Ground Up," which quantifies the trends of AI agent payments based on real-time on-chain data. The report points out that intelligent commerce should be divided into macro transactions (AI agents completing bookings, subscriptions, etc., adapting to existing card systems) and micro payments (high-frequency small payments between machines, with individual transactions far below $1, which traditional payment structures struggle to support).The report focuses on two "machine-native payment" protocols: x402 (developed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, etc., launching in May 2025) with an adjusted transaction volume of approximately $15 million and 109.6 million transactions as of April 21, 2026, with 422,000 buyers and about 5,300 sellers, primarily concentrated on Base, Solana, and Polygon, settled in USDC; MPP (developed by Stripe and Tempo, with Visa's participation, launching in mid-March 2026) had a transaction volume of approximately $25,000 and 115,000 transactions within 33 days of launch, supporting both on-chain crypto payments and fiat settlements.The report believes that the leap in AI capabilities (with the release of Claude 4.5 and GPT Codex 5.2 in mid-2025) has created a demand for programmatic payments, combined with the decreasing costs of blockchain settlements, making micro payments in the range of 1 cent to 1 dollar economically viable for the first time. Currently, the boundaries between crypto-native protocols and card payment camps are gradually blurring, but agent payments still face trust challenges such as erroneous purchases, adversarial attacks, and liability attribution.

Based on the x402 open standard, the HTTP native payment infrastructure PayGo officially announced the completion of strategic financing, with investors including United Overseas Bank (UOB), Signum Capital, and Ledger Capital.It is reported that PayGo is natively built on the ENI blockchain, with its core business providing account-free, subscription-free, and API Key-free request-level instant stablecoin (USDT/USDC) payment settlement services using the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code for APIs, AI entities, and the machine economy. PAYG is the governance token for the project.

ChainCatcher reported live that HashKey Group Chairman Xiao Feng shared a keynote speech titled "Innovation of Economic Models for Intelligent Agents—The Fusion Revolution of AI Tokens, Blockchain Tokens, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption" at this year's 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. He pointed out that the two major business characteristics of blockchain technology are trustlessness and permissionlessness, but public transparency leads to data exposure, making it difficult for compliant institutions like banks to directly go on-chain. With fully homomorphic encryption chips expected to be launched in the second half of this year, achieving performance of about 1000 transactions per second, privacy computing technology is about to reach commercial thresholds.He proposed that the fusion of AI Tokens, blockchain Tokens, zero-knowledge proofs, and fully homomorphic encryption technology is the ultimate form of the intelligent agent economy. He used hospitals as an example: medical data, after being fully homomorphically encrypted, becomes Tokens, and anyone can call the data for computation through the blockchain in a permissionless manner, but cannot access personal privacy information, thus turning hospitals into "Token factories." Individuals can also put their encrypted health check data on-chain, issuing demands to global insurance companies, which can calculate and provide personalized optimal insurance plans in an encrypted state using their actuarial models, eliminating the need for insurance brokers and intermediaries.He specifically corrected a common misunderstanding: AI Tokens are not the currency unit of the intelligent agent economy, but rather the means of production, encompassing everything from electricity, chip computing power, to large models, algorithms, and applications, depicting the production process of intelligent agents. The currency of the intelligent agent economy must be programmable, divisible, and capable of real-time settlement, because when AI Agents call APIs, they may only need a few cents each time, and the costs of existing banking payment systems cannot support such small payments. Digital currency is the "blood" of the intelligent agent economy, and a brand new financial service system designed for machines rather than humans will definitely emerge in the future.

Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero (who previously joined Tempo) published a post clarifying five misconceptions about MPP. Dan stated that MPP is not only applicable to Tempo, and that the protocol is independent of payment methods, supporting both cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies as well as any blockchain. It has currently expanded to the Bitcoin Lightning Network and there is already a draft for Solana expansion.In terms of usage costs, MPP itself has no inherent fees, and the specific costs depend on the blockchain or fiat channel used; regarding openness, MPP is designed to be simple and scalable, and has been submitted as a Web standard to the IETF.Additionally, MPP supports both Pay-per-request and session-based modes, the latter being suitable for continuous small payments that require API speed; Dan also emphasized that MPP achieves a separation of secure HTTP communication and payment rails, without relying on specific smart wallet implementations or stablecoins.

ChainCatcher news, according to Axios, the micro-payment startup Code has completed a $6.5 million seed round financing, led jointly by M13 and Union Square Ventures (USV). Code is now live, having developed an application for online micro-payments.Code is based on the kin (KIN) cryptocurrency, with Kin's value calculated in thousandths of a penny, designed to make the consumption of small amounts of money very easy. Additionally, the team has released a developer platform and is about to launch a new blogging tool that allows anyone to earn money through writing.