Circle just dropped a formal playbook for how machines should pay each other. The company published a USDC method specification for the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), creating a standardized framework for AI agents and automated services to settle transactions in USDC across EVM-compatible blockchains and Solana.
What the Machine Payments Protocol actually does
MPP establishes an open standard for machine-to-machine payments. The protocol was developed in collaboration with Stripe and Tempo, two names that signal Circle is serious about bridging traditional payments infrastructure with crypto-native settlement.
The core idea is straightforward. AI agents need a way to transact autonomously, whether that means paying for compute resources, settling API calls, or handling microtransactions between services. MPP gives them a shared protocol to do exactly that, with USDC as the settlement asset.
MPP supports nanopayments as low as $0.000001 per transaction, enabled through EIP-3009 batching, a method that allows multiple transfer authorizations to be bundled efficiently.
