Machine payments

Machine payments are payments where the payer is a program rather than a person. An autonomous agent reads a price, decides to pay, and settles, all on its own and often many times within a single task. For this to work the payment has to be machine-native: a rail the software can settle on without human sign-off, a price it can read before spending, and a receipt it can verify afterward. Cards and subscriptions fit poorly because they assume a human at signup and checkout.

The requirements are mostly about removing humans from the loop without removing accountability. The agent needs to authenticate, hold or access funds, read machine-readable prices, settle programmatically, and prove afterward what it paid. Spend controls and verifiable receipts matter more here than in human payments, because no person is reviewing each charge as it happens.

Proxygate is built for machine payments. An agent authenticates once, funds a prepaid USDC balance, and pays per request as it calls APIs, with each call returning the exact amount charged and a signed receipt. Settlement is in USDC on Solana, funding and withdrawal run over the x402 rail, and when gasless mode is on the platform covers the Solana fees so the agent needs only USDC.