1 million payments
per second

AI will not wait at a checkout screen. The future of internet payments needs to be built for permissionless, unprecedented scale.

Read the docs

Live throughput / 1 second window

100K

Unique wallets

1M+

Payments issued every second

80B+

Payments in 24 hours

$0.0078

Per 1M payments

Sustained 24h benchmark

Payment channels
let agents
pay as they go.

Payment Channels are a new Solana primitive built to solve this across x402 and MPP payment protocols.

A payment channel lets an agent authorize a spending limit once, spend against the limit, and settle the payment amount once. Put money down up front, run up usage without paying per transaction, and settle the bill once when you leave.

Active Payment Channel

Agent

Authorize onceSet a spending limit

Channel

Pay as you goMany signed updates

Solana

Settle onceReturn unused funds

Where per-call
payments break

While pay-per-request models simplify paid tool use, allowing access to many APIs and endpoints without an API key or account creation, certain kinds of agentic spending patterns are a bad fit for settling every request onchain:

Payment Channels amortize the onchain work down to one open and one settle, no matter how much metering happens in between.

Single calls with unknown costs

Certain requests have variable costs. For example an LLM completion billed per token, or a job billed per byte or per second of compute.

Many small deliveries

A token-by-token streaming response, or a burst of hundreds of cheap calls in a short time period.

How it works
under the hood

View the program

Open

Deposit a ceiling amount into onchain escrow. Funds stay non-custodial, held by the program, not the operator.

Meter off-chain

The agent authorizes spending with signed messages, not transactions. Every call is a signature and incurs no transaction costs.

Batched settlement

Actual amounts consumed are recorded onchain in one batched transaction.

Distribute

Unused deposit returns to the sender, and committed amounts are distributed to all configured recipients.

Settlement is the bill,
not the bottleneck.

Human approvals

A human ends up back in the loop, approving payments one at a time.

Settlement cost and latency

Every payment carries settlement cost and latency. When millions of transactions need to be settled, costs add up fast.

Custodial workarounds

Prepaid credits mean your balance is gone on the first call and tracked in someone else’s database.

100,000 channels. 25,000 transactions. One completed settlement cycle.

A settlement transaction carries four channel updates. The full cycle finalized all 100,000 channels while one million payments per second continued at application speed.

Run the benchmark

~203 s100k-channel settlement cycle observed
0.625 SOLFee for the 100k-channel settlement cycle
25,000Four-channel settlement transactions

Built open,
works everywhere

Payment Channels map cleanly onto the open agentic payment standards live on Solana today.

x402 UPTO

Authorize a ceiling for a single metered call. Your handler runs, the operator settles the one actual amount, and refunds the difference.

x402 BATCH SETTLEMENT

Many deliveries, settled together.

MPP SESSION

Open a channel and stream many metered deliveries, each authorized by a running cumulative voucher, and settle once when the session idle-closes.

Live at launch
with Alibaba Cloud

Inference has been one of the most in demand use cases across agentic payment protocols. We are excited to be launching Payment Channels with Alibaba Cloud. Their API endpoints are live and payable on pay.sh today. Your agent can authorize once and consume their cloud APIs at scale, paying in stablecoins as it goes.

Launch partner