The partnership between Circle and OpenMind aims to establish secure standards for machine-to-machine payments.
This collaboration will focus on the adoption of the open-source x402 protocol for facilitating automated microtransactions.
Additionally, both companies are working towards enabling an economy driven by autonomous AI agents and automated services.
The x402 x Circle Gateway Plan
Circle intends to develop a unified architecture for M2M payments that can handle the anticipated increase in agency payments. In this context, AI agents will be capable of autonomously paying for content, API usage, model inference, and research tasks at a high frequency.
The partnership was announced on an X post and involves creating the necessary infrastructure for autonomous software agents while aiming to develop foundational interoperable infrastructure for the emerging autonomous agent economy and AI services.
Central to this integration is Circle’s proposal to modify how payment validation functions within the x402 specification. As a result, Circle plans to create a Gateway-based system for micropayments in x402 and seeks community input on it. Moreover, they aim to provide a deferred settlement mechanism offering instant finality and high throughput.
The solution is based on Circle’s chain-agnostic framework, Circle Gateway, which will cover both EVM and non-EVM chains. This framework adheres to existing x402 interfaces where possible, making it easy to integrate, while also preparing for the release of a deferred scheme that clarifies its actions further.
