Polygon (POL) says a new payment system for AI agents processed more than 11 million verified payments per second in its own tests across 25 hubs.
Polygon Agent Pay Channels
Polygon described the tool, called agent pay channels, in a blog post and said each payment update cleared its engine in 20 microseconds, plus network latency.
A payer funds a channel once. As the agent consumes a service, it sends signed payment updates through a hub, and the accumulated value settles on Polygon Chain in batches.
Polygon ran the tests on a live devnet against an inference API modeled on OpenRouter, using a stand-in provider and the x402 protocol. The full x402 path hit about 40,000 payments per second.
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Why Polygon Targets AI Agents
Polygon argues that agents can't wait for daily invoices, and prepaid accounts lock up capital and limit provider choice. OpenRouter alone processes over 10 trillion AI tokens daily. The company said hubs don't coordinate on payments, so capacity grows as hubs are added, with 1 billion updates costing about $0.15 in the benchmark.
Polygon Labs unveiled its Open Money Stack, a stablecoin payments platform, on Jan. 8 and plans to connect the new channels to it soon. The company says its chain has processed over $2.7 trillion in stablecoin transfers across 159 million wallet addresses. The stack already supports x402.
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