On June 23, Circle published the official USDC specification for the Machine Payments Protocol. The mechanics are elegant: an agent calls an MPP-enabled endpoint, the server answers with HTTP 402 Payment Required, the agent signs an EIP-3009 USDC authorization and retries, and Circle Gateway verifies and settles - batched, with a crosschain profile, no API keys, every request attributable to a wallet address. It's part of the Agent Stack Circle has been assembling since May, and it already has its first USDC-backed derivative (USDCx on Stacks) building against the spec.
A few months before that, ERC-8183 - "Agentic Commerce," proposed by Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team - specified a different verb. Not paying: hiring. A Client agent posts a job and locks the budget in on-chain escrow; a Provider agent does the work and submits proof; an Evaluator confirms the deliverable before funds release or refund. BNB Chain shipped the first live implementation, the BNBAgent SDK, bundling ERC-8004 identity, escrow, and decentralized arbitration into one framework - on testnet now, mainnet planned.
So in the space of a few months, machine commerce got two of its three verbs standardized.
