Agentic Payments Introduction

Agentic Payments represent a new frontier for finance and commerce on-chain: keyless, wallet-less, and infrastructure-agnostic.

They enable autonomous actors - whether humans, apps, or AI agents - to transact, settle, and coordinate value directly across the Polygon ecosystem with minimal friction.

Polygon is building the foundation for this agentic future by open-sourcing the critical components: developer tools, payment facilitators, SDKs, reference agents, and model prompts.

Our goal is to make payments as natural for agents as browsing a web page: secure, interoperable, and composable across chains, protocols, and apps.

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What Are Agentic Payments

Agentic Payments are payments initiated and completed by autonomous software entities - agents - without direct human action at every step.

Instead of requiring a person to click "confirm transaction", an agent can negotiate prices, sign intents, and pay on-chain in the background, using predefined policies or earned balances.

This shift moves on-chain activity from user-driven to intent-driven.

An agent doesn't just send tokens - it executes a purpose: subscribing to data, paying per API call, or settling micro-invoices in real time.

By encoding payment logic inside agents and standardizing protocols like x402, Polygon allows any intelligent system to become an autonomous economic participant.

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Agents

In this context, an agent is an autonomous program that can perceive, decide, and act on behalf of a user or a system.

Agents combine reasoning models (LLMs, decision trees) with access to data, APIs, and on-chain actions.

They can interpret natural language commands, interact with contracts, and coordinate with other agents—all without exposing private keys or depending on centralized custody.

On Polygon, agents leverage a growing suite of tooling - AgentKit, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Unified APIs - to understand their environment and perform secure blockchain operations.

This ecosystem makes it possible for an AI assistant, a trading bot, or a DAO delegate to act as a true on-chain entity: context-aware, policy-bounded, and continuously learning.

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Agentic Payments

Agentic Payments are what happens when these autonomous systems gain the ability to move money safely and predictably.

Instead of traditional wallet interactions, payments are executed via intents or facilitated flows such as x402.

An agent can detect that an API call costs $0.002 in USDC, confirm the requirement, and complete the payment automatically, all in milliseconds.

Because they're keyless and infrastructure-agnostic, Agentic Payments work across environments: from local LLMs to decentralized marketplaces.

They make microtransactions, dynamic subscriptions, and per-use economics viable for both human-facing apps and AI agents.

This creates a new kind of economy—where attention, data, and compute can all transact at machine speed, transparently and on-chain.