Circle has announced its partnership with OpenMind in order to develop foundational standards for secure machine-to-machine payments.
Following this announcement, the partnership is expected to focus on adopting and promoting the open-source x402 protocol for automated microtransactions.
Furthermore, the initiative is set to work in the process of enabling the future economy of autonomous AI agents and automated services.
The x402 x Circle Gateway scheme
According to the official announcement, the collaboration aims to develop a unified M2M payments architecture that will be capable of supporting the projected surge in agentic payments, where AI agents will be designed in order to autonomously pay for content, API usage, model inference, and research tasks at extremely high frequency. At the same time, the move, which was announced in an X post, is set to also center on addressing the infrastructure required for the growing economy of autonomous software agents, while the companies aim to develop foundational, interoperable infrastructure needed for the emerging autonomous agent economy and AI services.
A core part of the integration is Circle’s overall proposal to adjust how the x402 specification treats payment validation. With this in mind, Circle plans to build a Gateway-based system for micropayments in x402 and is currently looking for community input on it. Moreover, the company aims to offer a system of deferred settlement that delivers instantaneous finality and support for very high throughput.
Built on Circle's chain-agnotistic framework, Circle Gateway, this solution is expected to immediately extend across chains supporting both EVM and non-EVM chains, as the firm kept to existing x402 interfaces wherever possible to make it as easy as possible to swap in, and will have support for the exact scheme. In addition, this process will take place while also planning to release support for a deferred scheme that makes its action more explicit. The initiative aims to extend the existing Gateway API in order to be able to act as a facilitator for these schemes.
